The Tim Ferriss Show - #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art

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Starting point is 00:03:13 routines, favorite books, breakfasts, whatever it might be that you can test and apply in your own life. The specifics, the details, the beliefs, habits, and so on that you can actually use in the real world. In this episode, we have a fantastic guest I've wanted to connect with for a very long time, Darren Aronofsky. So who is Darren? We're going to get to that in a second. But he was introduced to me by another podcast guest, Peter Attia, who is a medical doctor,

Starting point is 00:03:43 an endurance athlete, or he would say former endurance athlete. And I encourage you to also check out his episodes because it'll put a lot in context. And Peter has three episodes. If you just go to tim.blog forward slash Atia, A-T-T-I-A, you will find three of them. They start with Dr. Peter Atia on life extension, drinking, jet fuel, ultra endurance, human foie gras, Peter Attia on life extension, drinking, jet fuel, ultra endurance, human foie gras, and more to the next one, optimizing, investing blood hormones and life. Then my life extension pilgrimage to Easter Island. It's a long story, but check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Attia, but back to Darren. Darren Aronofsky. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Darren,

Starting point is 00:04:25 D-A-R-R-E-N Aronofsky, A-R-O-N-O-F-S-K-Y to say hello. And he's doing some very cool stuff on Instagram. And Darren Aronofsky.com is the founder and head of the production company Protozoa Pictures. He is the acclaimed and award-winning filmmaker behind cult classics like Pie, Requiem for a Dream, and The Wrestler, which are really just the tip of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which happens to be the oldest film festival in the world, where it became only the third U.S. film in history to win the esteemed Golden Lion Award. Darren later directed the indie box office phenomenon Black Swan, which won Natalie Portman the Academy Award for Best Actress and garnered four other Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Then his biblically inspired epic Noah opened at number one at the box office and grossed more than $362 million worldwide. His latest movie is Mother with a lowercase m and an exclamation point,

Starting point is 00:05:38 a psychological horror thriller film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and many others. Michelle Pfeiffer goes on. I've had a chance to see this movie and I'm stumbling over my words because it's hard to describe. It was mind-bending, super intense, and I walked around in a dream state for an entire day after seeing this. It is unlike anything you have ever seen so if you want to strap on your seat belt and go on a roller coaster i suggest that you check it out so without further ado please enjoy my conversation with darren aronofsky darren sir welcome to the show thank you. I have been looking forward to meeting you for some time now.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Well, thank you. I'm a big fan as well. We have quite a few mutual friends and I have some suggestions. I won't mention them by name yet as to topics and questions, but I wanted to start with a question about your writing environment. Oh, that's a good question. I've read a little bit about a desk, peculiar desk. Could you describe this desk and if you still use it? It was interesting. I know you've spent time in Japan. And so I was in Japan probably promoting, I don't know if it was Paya Requiem for a Dream. And I went to some spa town south of Tokyo.

Starting point is 00:07:06 I can't remember the name of it. And I guess it was the kind of nexus of this place where they make these puzzle boxes. I don't know if you've ever seen them. They're kind of beautiful patterned wooden boxes. And you can't really see any hinges or any spaces. But if you slide a few panels in a certain order, and it could be up to eight, 16, 32 moves, depending on how much money you want to spend, eventually it opens and there's a secret compartment. And it blew my mind. I had never seen any type of souvenir like it. I

Starting point is 00:07:38 bought a couple and I played with it for a long time. And then I think it was early days of internet. So I started to Google a little bit about what it is. There's a whole art form. I won't try to butcher the Japanese word for it, but I then noticed that there were contests worldwide and that there was this one dude who was winning year after year contest and he was a guy in Colorado. So I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. And so just randomly I tracked him down and I sent him an email. His name's Kagan Sound. And I sent him an email. I said, hey, you know, did you ever think of doing any furniture? And he's like, well, actually I'm working on this thing for a library. And I said, well, it'd be interesting

Starting point is 00:08:21 maybe to do a desk out of it. And he loved the idea. And then he, it was amazing. He said, well, it would be interesting maybe to do a desk out of it. And he loved the idea. And then he – it was amazing. He said, true master. We should probably go over to my house and check it out. I would love to see it. David saw it. I don't know if he told you about it, but he freaked the hell out. So, David Blaine.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Yeah. This is part of why I'm asking. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. So, anyway, he ended up this master. So the whole thing has made it completely out of wood. He doesn't work with any other materials but wood.

Starting point is 00:08:51 And I'm not sure the count on puzzles in the desk, but it's, I mean, scores of them. And eventually they all sort of work together to build to a final release where basically he was able to turn it into a musical instrument. He created bellows all controlled with wood and the draws. And by actually pushing the draws, it creates sounds and it has a full octave. And he asked me what song I wanted. And he then was able to build a, basically a computer thing that has switches that are all blown by the bellows. And if they're done in the right order, a panel flaps open in the back with a secret draw. So it took him five years to do it. And it was insane. And I think the price we agreed on was a crime at the beginning.

Starting point is 00:09:41 A crime to him or a crime to you? A crime to him. It was a crime to him. And I to him. And then I realized I didn't have a chair for it. So then I said, we should make a puzzle chair for it. Another five years later. And I paid through the nose for that to get them back. But it's a beautiful thing and it's a great desk. I want to say, I read this in a previous interview that you've referred yourself as a nomadic writer, writing in one place for a few weeks and then moving locations. So how does your writing process differ project to project? Or do you, how do you use say the desk that we were just talking about and combine that with shifting locations? I'm on book deadline right now. So I'm thinking about this.

Starting point is 00:10:18 And of course I'll do anything to avoid writing, including interviews. Exactly. I completely understand that procrastination. But my writing partner, a guy I write with a lot, Ari Handel, once said to me, probably the most important thing I taught him was that, and I didn't do this on purpose, is that procrastination is part of the process. That actually your brain needs a break every once in a while. And not to say to abuse that, but to be a little easy on yourself and allow yourself to go to a bookstore, to go to a museum, to just even if you're serious about your work,

Starting point is 00:10:53 even when you're not working, you are working. Your brain is putting stuff together. And, you know, inspiration comes from the strangest places, as we all know. You know, you suddenly stumble on something that's exactly what you were looking for when you didn't know you were looking for it. But it's changed my writing process. I used to what I do was a tremendous amount of prep where we would do a tremendous amount of research and outlines and eventually get to a place where we were exhausted with that. And then I would do something called the muscle draft where I would go and disappear somewhere, usually far away where I could be very alone and be very lonely. And that loneliness

Starting point is 00:11:30 would inspire me to work hard and fast. And I would muscle out a draft, which meant I would never go back. It was all about just pounding through it to get to the end as quick as possible. And it was like a two, three day process. And you come out with like, um, if it ended up being 120 page screenplay, you'd have an eight 79, 80 page screenplay. But in that muscle draft, there would be moments when you, you know, when you do enter that zone, I don't know if you have a term for it, if you run into it, but there's that zone when you kind of forget time it's, you know, I imagine athletes are doing it and rock musicians seem to be doing it when they their eyes roll back in their head but as a writer every once while you get that where where time

Starting point is 00:12:13 disappears and something comes out on the page and that scene is often something that ends up staying all the way through to the end of the process. When you are muscling out that first draft, is it in, are you using screenwriting software? Is it just kind of brain vomiting bullets into a Word document? What does it look like? I'm trying to think. I mean, you know, Final Draft has been around

Starting point is 00:12:41 for a long time now, and it's a great software that I've used. I don't know if Pi was written on it. It's hard to remember. That was 97. So I doubt it probably. I probably was formatting stuff back then. I don't really remember.

Starting point is 00:12:58 But, you know, that just helps you. It helps you work quicker because, you know, instead of dealing with indentation, you press tabs and shortcuts to get through it quicker. I mean, screenwriting is very much like sculpture in the sense that if you start with a piece of clay, you don't want to just focus on the hand. Any artist that does that will tell you then the hand will be like grossly detailed and enlarged compared to the rest of the body. You kind of just want to slowly start cutting away at the clay to get closer and closer to the final form, you know, but you don't want to get the sandpaper out till you're ready for that like level of detail work. And so it's just about passes. You keep going through it. And once you say, I'm going to start

Starting point is 00:13:45 writing even if you get to page 30 and you think oh page five needs something you just make a note of it and then zap to the end before you ever go back so it's it's really like working it way working slowly away at that big clay do you no longer do the isolation retreats? I do it less and less. I mean, it's a funny story. I was just telling my son this was when I wrote Pi. My friend actually who does visual effects for me, his parents had a little cabin up outside of Woodstock. And I was like, hey, can I go there for a few days and pound out my muscle draft on Pi? And he was like, yeah, sure. And I went up there and his parents were uh intellectuals

Starting point is 00:14:25 and just had books and books and books they were academics so there was tons of books and i was you know procrastinating looking through the books and of course the only book that caught my attention was carry which i had never read so i proceeded to pound through procrastinating by reading carry scaring the living crap out of myself you know when you read king it's just like, wow. And then I really had to write quick because I had to get the hell out of this cabin. So I think I wrote the first draft of Pi in like 18 hours. Wow. But to talk about now, it's funny, this new movie, Mother, is very, very different process, the most different process than

Starting point is 00:15:04 I've ever done and probably more similar to where I started. I wrote the script in five days and it was this kind of fever dream when it happened. I had had the idea two weeks before and it started off with this idea for this allegory with a real kind of relationship drama at the core, but I didn't know how to structure it. And then I had this kind of breakthrough of what the structure is. And I had a five-day weekend without, my son was with his mom and I was all alone. And I just sat in my kitchen. I actually even go up to the desk and I just pounded it out in my kitchen, in my underwear, barely eating. It was just like this fever that came out of me in five days. And when I was done with the script, I showed it to my producers who didn't know I was

Starting point is 00:15:52 even working on something. And they were like, wow, I think there's something here. And it's weird. I think I've always been jealous of musicians. You know, you hear the story where Bob Dylan wrote a song in the afternoon and it became, you know, the anthem for a generation. But as filmmakers, we really don't get to do that. It takes us two to five years. I mean, you know, Black Swan, the first meeting with Natalie was 10 years before I shot it. The Wrestler was eight years. The Fountain took me six years. Noah was an idea for 20 years. You know, it's a long time. But I was like, is it possible as a filmmaker to take a single emotion and a feeling of,

Starting point is 00:16:32 and it's kind of what I was feeling right in that moment and try to channel it into a single track and into a movie. And I think that's kind of, it kind of captures a single emotion, this film, even though it has other stuff, it really was one color that burst right through. I want to talk about something maybe related to Fever Dream. So the idea of, or concept of madness. And I want to say, I'm certainly paraphrasing that maybe you've said that by walking the tightrope between sanity and insanity, you can learn what sanity is or something along those lines. Do you have a fascination with madness? I mean, if so, or why do people have that perception? I had an uncle who was schizophrenic. So I grew up around that and I got to see it very, very close and sort of saw his mindset and also how it weighed on my family. And the emotional ripples from that were

Starting point is 00:17:38 tremendous. And then I also saw how society treated people like that. And, um, so it's, it's something I've been very close to and I've always thought about it. And I remember reading, what was it? The denial of death. Did you ever read that book? No, that's a good one for you. Um, but they talk about the liminal, the line, the thin line between the, um, conscious and

Starting point is 00:18:04 the subliminal or i think how they were using between genius and insanity and there were things that my uncle would say that i mean he was a highly functioning guy he worked he worked as an engineer for new york city for his entire life and you know had a pension and all that you know made made it through but lived a very tough tough life because of the illness but um he would say things that were just unbelievable brilliant like i remember one time my dad was talking to him about something you know about how to do something i don't remember exactly the details and he said well i can't really say this on radio right oh you can if you want oh yeah and he said something like yeah that's like if you fuck a snake you get an elephant

Starting point is 00:18:50 and i remember hearing it i was whatever i was 12 or 13 but that's kind of a crazy metaphor and kind of beautiful and it's so extreme you know it was like the best way of saying yeah right like you're selling me the brooklyn So, but he had many of those that were just sort of like, that's not proper English and, but it kind of works, you know. Do you, I've always had just an absolute fascination with that very thin line. When I was an undergrad, I was, I'm not a mathematician. In fact, part of the reason I went to Princeton is because at the time, at least, did not have a math requirement. I was scared off of math by a very belligerent teacher in 10th grade.

Starting point is 00:19:31 Oh, that sucks. Yeah, it was terrible. My brother, in fact, same grade, different teacher, was steered in the opposite direction and is finishing a PhD in statistics. It just shows you what teachers can do. But I was drawn to a few specifically mathematicians at Princeton who were really riding that razor's edge and had multiple suicide attempts, but were also brilliant beyond all description. and became effectively a different person, still very smart. But have you ever worried that you would bleed over that edge? You know, luckily my hubris doesn't go that far where I get that worry. I'm not crazy hypochondriac and stuff, but yeah, sure. When I was a teenager and i read somewhere that like it like schizophrenia is on set can happen in your 20s you know that idea that when

Starting point is 00:20:32 you're a fully formed human being suddenly things can change for you that was a scary idea will it happen for me um but you know i uh you know and i and i definitely think when it came to you know, and I definitely think when it came to, you know, perhaps exploring, you know, plant enhancements, I was always a little terrified that I might go too far in a certain direction. But, you know, so it's always been in the back of my head a little bit just because, you know, a lot of that stuff is genetic. But I don't think it's really haunted me. But I guess maybe a little bit you thought the genetic, but I don't think it's really haunted me, but I guess maybe a little bit you, you thought the possibility of the fear of it. Yeah. Well, I, I almost off myself in college. So I went through a very, very dark period, uh, that actually talked about really publicly in a major way for the first time on stage at Ted, which really shut the room down. Well, no, good for you. I think it's important.

Starting point is 00:21:26 But that is always or has always been kind of in the back of my mind. And one of the things that I got from, as you put it, plant enhancements or psychedelic experience was temporarily experiencing what could only be, would have to be on some level synonymous with extreme mental illness. Definitely. And having a connection and developing more empathy as a result, living in a place like San Francisco, where you're just surrounded by people who are homeless and mentally ill. So one of the topics I had down to talk about was psychedelics,

Starting point is 00:22:04 which was suggested by someone we both know who will remain nameless for now. I want to know who that was. I'm not sure how you feel. There are only three. But what role has that played in your life? Or how do you think about it as fitting into your life? Well, look, I think it's, I've researched it, read a lot about it. I think it's very interesting.

Starting point is 00:22:29 I mean, you know, um, the story of, uh, of deer in Siberia that eat mushrooms and fall over and it doesn't seem like there's any true, you know, survival of the fittest evolutionary positivity for a deer to make itself that helpless. So maybe there is something else going on that some other medicine or something else that this creature is getting out of putting itself at risk was just a fascinating idea. And the fact that shamanism and reaching alternative states has been just part of our culture for a super long time and then somehow got completely washed out and i don't know turned into the sacrament maybe rock and roll music but we've really lost um you know anything that's sort of trying to

Starting point is 00:23:18 reach away from scientific reality is you know clearly a loss and um and it seems like um you know there's a lot of wisdom to come out of you know some exploration in a safe type of examination as long as very controlled environments, it's as clearly tremendous benefit, you know, that's happened, you know, for society, you know, over that's recently been discovered and is being rediscovered right now. Yeah, I'm involved with some research at Johns Hopkins and a few other places related to use of psilocybin specifically in potentially addressing treatment-resistant depression, among other things. That's what's fascinating. All that stuff that MAPS is doing with PTSD and the fact that the Defense Department is supporting it, you know, because it seems to be working.

Starting point is 00:24:18 You know, I just saw a film that came out of Israel that is using MDMA to sort of help people deal with, not just soldiers, but people deal with all different types of emotional distress. It's fascinating and it's interesting. And it's clearly, you know, if the defense department is sort of supporting it, then there's probably some, you know, it's probably pretty interesting to them. I think it's also a really smart place for research to start or one, at least to the subsets of the population, that's very smart to work with is returning vets. Yeah. Specifically among other reasons, because it is a nonpartisan

Starting point is 00:24:58 issue. It's very hard to be like, fuck the vets or like screw the terminal cancer patients who want to decrease end of life anxiety. It's funny though, because another thing I'm involved with is I'm on the board of directors for the Sierra club and a big part of what Sierra club is trying to do is get vets into nature. And we have all these different programs that do that. And in fact, I actually went to the Arctic with two vets and it was amazing for them to sort of, you know, not just to have that experience, which is completely mind expansive to see, you know, nature in a, in a true, to see true wilderness, like what's happening in the Arctic. But, um, I think to the, a lot of them, what they expressed to me is they actually, this is what they were fighting for, was to defend this, you know, in their spirit. So they actually get to see the beauty of America outside of the cities that they're from.

Starting point is 00:25:51 So I want to continue to talk for a little bit about really old traditions. Because what we're talking about, or at least some of these traditions have existed for millennia. Fasting is another one. Yeah. Have you done experiments with fasting? A little bit. It's something I definitely want to get more into. I've been totally into the idea for a long time. Of course, you know, I fast once a year. Not that I'm religious, but because I like the spiritual practice of fasting once a day with my buddies. And so I get together with my friends and fast

Starting point is 00:26:25 for that one day, but a long-term fasting, I think is fascinating. And I've heard great stories about it, but I haven't, I haven't actually had to, it's amazing how little that goes on and in our privileged lives and how, you know, um, that's just a very interesting practice. What, what is interesting about it to you? Because I try to, for instance, I try to do, and note to people listening, I'm not a doctor. I don't play on the internet. So don't be stupid.

Starting point is 00:26:55 Talk to a qualified medical professional, blah, blah, blah. But I've done, I tend to do at least three days of consecutive fasting per month. And then I do longer fasts a few times per year. Wow. And you do just water. I will make some allowances. And I do it differently at different times.

Starting point is 00:27:12 But what I will sometimes do is use fasting as a way to kickstart ketosis. So clicking over into ketosis. Certainly our friend Peter Tia knows a lot about that. He was in ketosis for about two and a half years straight, but fasting for a period of time. And what I will allow if I'm doing a longer fast in particular is I will allow myself non-caloric drinks that are unsweetened. So let's say black tea, black coffee.

Starting point is 00:27:42 Right. And Kit Kat bars. And Kit Kat bars. only zero calorie kit kat bars and i will also particularly in the beginning allow myself uh some exogenous ketones so they're just supplemental ketones or fat like coconut oil to help with the transition that's great but besides that amazing next and the pain is after two three days right it's supposed to ease off yeah for most men women can sometimes take a little longer to click over for most men about two to three days right and and then you can then you can click over um all right well let's do

Starting point is 00:28:17 it i'm in i'm in what interests you about the fasting i mean mean, once again, it's just a way, it's clearly a way to explore other spaces. You know, I mean, I immediately, for me, if I've got a difficult meeting where I kind of have to be a jerk because something's not getting done correctly, you know, if I skip breakfast and do it close to when lunch is, you know, I get stuff done. So I do in my own way, I do micro fasting to control my mood, knowing that, you know, some of that anxiety and anger will disappear as soon as I eat. So it's sometimes a good thing to sort of motivate myself to help with the work in certain ways. So I do do my own mood enhancement. I mean, for a long time, um, you know, I was dating someone and, you know, we used to get at each other. And then finally, um, someone turned, turned me onto the word hangry, which is the hungry, which I think is probably pretty common now, but at the time it was a pretty new word. And that was, it kind of changed my relationship and kept the relationship going

Starting point is 00:29:26 for the next three, four years because we could actually identify why we both became assholes for a little bit. So clearly it's a major mood, um, you know, blocker and changer and alternator and all that stuff. So I think that's interesting. And then, you know, I've heard and read all about the health benefits of it. And, and then of course there's all the meditative elements of it, the control, the mind over the body and all, you know, what David Blaine is always demonstrating, clearly going to some serious extremes. But, you know, I think there are lessons to be learned and experiences to be have had had during it. so this is sort of the nature of my fragmented mind that we're going to jump around a lot but you mentioned uh difficult conversations

Starting point is 00:30:12 or where you have to be an asshole uh i had read about well very very much in passing you having a conversation with mickey rourke before filming well mickey's version yeah well no so i actually don't have a whole lot of context but but roughly that you knew it wasn't going to be easy that he had a lot of strong opinions so you had sort of a an honest upfront conversation and i would love to hear how you open a conversation like that or plan for it. You know, I look, um, you know, Mickey at the time, you know, had an awful reputation. Um, and I think that's because, you know, he, you know, I, I think he, in many ways he was a lot of his worst enemy because he just, you know, loved acting, but he also loved boxing.

Starting point is 00:31:10 And he had this fight and struggle between him, which one he was going to focus on. And I think he really respected the box. Anyway, whatever happened with him, everyone was warning me about him. Everyone. But I love him. And I loved his work. Before I knew him, I loved his work. Before I knew him, I just, I thought his work was exceptional. And I, it was, I felt the crime on the acting arts that he did not have more opportunities to share himself with the world. Cause whenever he has shared himself, it was unbelievable from bar fly to angel heart to all of that beautiful early work he did.

Starting point is 00:31:45 And then it just sort of disappeared. But I just wanted to be very clear with him because I felt I just knew how challenging the film we were about to do was going to be. And I just I find that the longer I do this, the more clear you can be up front, the better. Because no matter what happens, it always changes. I think sometimes people don't really hear what you're saying to them a lot because they really want to do something. as many of the problems off the table, because when we do get to set time is really the biggest enemy or, you know, foe because it's so short and, and it happens so quickly that if you start getting to stupid things that weren't pre-discussed, it's a nightmare. And so you have to be as completely prepared and professional as you can when you're spending whatever it is, $20,000 a

Starting point is 00:32:44 minute or whatever it may be that day. You know, you want to, you know, Mike Tyson money time is what I'm talking about. You want to be on top of your game. So I just went in very clearly with Mickey. And I think what it meant for Mickey for it is like he looked at me like medicine. You know, he tasted really bad, but he knew it was good for him. So, you know, he just closed his eyes and opened his mouth and swallowed to get it done and and really to keep um because i think he knew deep in his heart that what i was trying to do was you know make a great

Starting point is 00:33:18 film with him and uh and then and then he rose to it and he brought it and and bring it but you know he talks about that meeting you know like the little skinny punk coming to him and pointing his little stubby finger in his face, which I love. It's funny. I wish I was that tough and that straightforward. I'm sure I was more cordial and polite to him because I know I was in awe of him and excited to meet him. But I just wanted to be clear that, like, look, you know, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this, let's roll up our sleeves and go for it. Um, because it's just for me, filmmaking is so hard. Um, I, I think for a lot of people, there's just so many challenges.

Starting point is 00:33:58 It's like, you know, literally every single film I've done has been like its own IPO. It's, it's own corporation. You know, I start off with an idea. I have to attract talent and money to come together. Yes, there's a formula, but I generally are making things that don't quite fit into the widget factory. They're a little weird and stuff. Yeah. I don't think they fit in the widget. So we have to, you know, I have to convince people why it's going to be a widget and then we have to raise the money and hopefully, you know, make it and get the, get the investors monies back. And, you know, I'm five for six, which isn't bad, but you know, each time it's, it's a real, it's a lot of work. So, um, you want to make the whole process of it

Starting point is 00:34:42 for all the artists working with you as easy as possible. That's not really where you want to make the whole process of it for all the artists working with you as easy as possible. That's not really where you want to put your fighting. You want to do the fighting for the world and the money and all that. Let's say you're making a new film and you're working with someone who you respect just to depersonalize a little bit. Although you could give a real example. Let's say like Mickey, someone you really admire who has a reputation for being very strong willed and you're strong-willed, and you're going to have this conversation again. Yeah. How do you open it?

Starting point is 00:35:10 What are some of the phrases that you use to prevent it from blowing up or to try to allow it to go well? Of course. I mean, look, I mean, I've never done a situation where I'm asking someone, hey, we're going to waterboard you for three months. You know, I mean, we're trying to do something that's exciting and hopefully beautiful and, you know, striving to make art. So that's the underlining agreement. So you're walking into that conversation, hey, I dig you, you dig me, let's try to make this work.

Starting point is 00:35:41 But just to be clear, these are some of the things that are going to be going on that will probably make you feel uncomfortable and what would be some examples of those you know well i mean a lot a very clear example would be you know when working with women if there's things that or men with those things that are sexual in nature you know what's required nudity wise and all that type of stuff. And you have to talk about that beforehand because of course it's very sensitive material and you want everyone to be comfortable and very clear on why you're doing something. You know, anytime you do like a lovemaking scene, what exactly is it going to be and why? And I've never really, I've never done

Starting point is 00:36:19 a lovemaking scene to sort of make it sort of an erotic thing for an audience, I always, you know, try to tie it in narratively. So I tell them very clearly where the camera's going to be, what we're going to do, how we're going to run the set, stuff like that. Same thing with violence. You know, violence, I think, is just as important in the other way of, you know, what we're going to be, how we're going to be demonstrating violence, how we're going to show it. I mean, for me, that's a huge pet peeve because I feel in this country, you know, sexuality and violence has flipped, especially in the movies where you can have as much violence as you want in a PG, PG-13 movie, but you can't have an ounce of sexuality in a PG or PG-13 movie. And that to me is, it's disgusting. I don't have words to go beyond that. The fact that

Starting point is 00:37:06 we're, you know, training our kids to fire guns at such a young age with Nerf guns and video games, it's disgusting and disturbing while, you know, any form of like saying there's a beauty in human connection, physical connection that no no we can't talk about that and the fact that the mpaa sort of reinforces that and and that's what i mean you know i mean here i'll go off but like guns and ads i walk down the street when my kid was five six years old and my kids pointing at huge crazy sexy looking machine guns on the biggest movie stars in the world. It's disgusting. The gun companies are getting free ads and yet you can't show someone kissing. So there's a whole sort of bend with that. I don't know how I got there, but I got there. Sorry.

Starting point is 00:37:59 I don't know how I get to where I go half the time. I want to talk a little bit about the word catharsis. I recently saw your new film. I really enjoyed the experience and came away. I told you this for a full day afterwards was in this dreamlike state. Wonderful. Which I savored. And I had a lot of questions and sometimes i i feel like we well actually

Starting point is 00:38:29 milan kundera i think said that you know the the stupidity of man is that he has all the answers and the intelligence or beauty of a novel is that it has a question for everything something like that that's interesting i'm paraphrasing and this is in his book of laughter and forgetting. But at one point I recall reading that you didn't intend people to have to find catharsis in your movies. You know, they expect to have happy endings and so on, but that perhaps the catharsis comes the day after seeing the film. What do you want the experience of your audience to be or what do you want them to take away from any one of your films? You could give a concrete example or just in general something that drives you. Well, I guess I start off with, you know, the first rule of filmmaking is never to bore an audience. That to me is the worst feeling and experience when I'm watching a movie and my mind is wandering and maybe looking

Starting point is 00:39:25 at the colors splatter across the screen. I think you always want to engage an audience, not just visually, not just through sound, but emotionally. So I think that's rule one is just to give people an engaging emotional experience for two hours, whatever your running time is. And then I think on top of that, you can hopefully layer in some ideas so that when people leave the theater, it's not like, you know, 15 minutes later, what did we watch? You know, I don't want to be the McDonald's of movies where the rapper, you know, it's just the rapper is all that's left over. I want people to be, you know, thinking a bit about and talking about it.

Starting point is 00:40:05 For me, one of my best life experiences was just randomly I walked into a coffee shop. And it happened to be around the corner from where Pi was playing in L.A. at the New Art. And a dad came in with his 18-year-old daughter and two of her friends. And the four of them were sitting there just talking about this black and white movie that they had just seen. And I just kind of eavesdropped, you know, listening to him, just thrilled that there was a conversation and a debate. And what did that mean? And what did that mean? And, you know, for me, that's always been the films I love is, you know, yes, you know, there are movies that you have a great experience in and enjoy. And it's just a great pleasure to watch and a great experience but i also like the ones

Starting point is 00:40:46 that you know um you know make you scratch your head and you think about you talk and you debate because uh you know you want to kind of have an impact and i think in today's landscape a lot of things are disposable and it's really really quick how disposable they are because of how quick, how much stuff we're being bombarded with day after day after day. It's nice to sort of hopefully have something that reflects back on it and thinks about it. You mentioned emotional, I think you said emotional connection or engagement. What are the, what are some of the ingredients that help to create that? Because most films fail i mean i i think anyway yeah i mean i i mean it starts with the greatest i think the greatest invention of the

Starting point is 00:41:31 20th century that's overlooked which is the close-up and that that's the great thing about cinema is the fact that you can stick a camera right in the face of paul newman right in those beautiful blue eyes and you can go right into his. And then when you project it months later to an audience or years later, potentially centuries later, you are anonymous in that audience, yet you can feel the empathy. Because in reality, two people talking and hanging out, how much eye contact do you make? There's lots of other things going on in this room that you're taking in, that air conditioner rattling, my guys mixing in the other room, but the actual connection with another human being where you're really looking into their soul and not thinking about yourself. Because the thing is, when I look at you and you look at me, we're thinking a little

Starting point is 00:42:17 bit about, wow, now I'm making it really uncomfortable us looking at each other and we're going to be looking away, but in a movie and via the closeup, you can be unconscious and fully be in Paul Newman's head. Even though you don't know exactly what he's thinking, you can sort of study him and steal and steal that thought. And that's, that to me is the great greatness of cinema, um, or one of the great things about cinema. And so, um, and that's where you get emotion, you know, and what happens is if you start linking

Starting point is 00:42:46 different emotions together, hopefully you start to tell a story. What the story does is it expands the emotion, just like a joke, you know, set up, set up, set up, pay off. You know, that's the classic structure of a joke. It's the same thing with drama where you're setting up a character and building a character, you give them a challenge and then you see them go through that challenge and pay off. And then there's always the pitfall when it all falls apart and then they rise up. And that hero's journey, you know, is just so, I don't know if it's genetic. I don't know if it's part of the human condition. I don't know if it's something that we're taught very, very young in our first Dr. Seuss books.

Starting point is 00:43:25 But it's something that we all around the planet in every language, in every culture can relate to. For me, the power of storytelling happened. I graduated high school early and backpacked around Europe and the Middle East. And I ended up in the Jemma in Marrakesh. I don't know if you've been there, but it's an amazing square in the middle of the souk, you know, where they have all the shops and stuff. And at nighttime, it's filled with snake charmers

Starting point is 00:44:00 and food and all this stuff. And there was one old guy leaning on a cane and a beard telling a story. And he had a huge crowd around him and it was all in Arabic. And I didn't understand a freaking word, but I was mesmerized. And I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to tell stories because that little old shriveled old guy on a cane was transforming himself into this 20 foot beast. And I didn't even understand the language. And I was like, that's cool, you know, to entertain a crowd with a point of view. Where was that experience relative to your time in Kenya? That was after Kenya. I'm also on the board of directors for an organization called

Starting point is 00:44:45 the School for Field Studies, which is a great organization out of Salem, Massachusetts, which basically trains mostly college students to go abroad and into sensitive environmental areas and do environmental studies. And when I was a, I don't know, a young teenager, I worked at the New York City Aquarium in Coney Island, which was right next to my neighborhood in Brooklyn. And one of the big perks of that job, besides being at the aquarium, was that if you wore the aquarium t-shirt, you got to go on the cyclone roller coaster over and over again. So we used to go 40, 50 times in a row on the cyclone, you know, and, um, but I picked up a book for the school for field studies there and they, it was just this little color catalog. And I was like, wow, they send kids to Kenya.

Starting point is 00:45:34 And I was like, ma, this is what I want to do. Dad, you know, and somehow they took a few high school students and I was, I was like an advanced biology. So I had a little bit, I was always good in science. My dad was a science teacher so I was always pointed in that direction a bit and so I got them to let me go to Kenya where I did, what I study, I study thermo regulate, no I studied water strategies and ungulates. The next year I went to Alaska with them to Prince William Sound, actually where that big Exxon spill was, but I was there two years before that, which was fascinating because the

Starting point is 00:46:09 research we did there, actually they use that research after the spill to see what the impact was. But in Alaska, I studied thermoregulation and harbor seals. I just like to say these words because they're fancy sounding so yeah ungulates now tell us what fall into the class of ungulates are there all animals that stand on their hooves got it so everything from cattle you know domesticated cattle to zebra gazelle deer wildebeest yeah there were no deer elk there might have been some elk and some type of elk there but but yeah. So it's all, that's true.

Starting point is 00:46:46 Right. I guess there'd be caribou in Alaska. It was interesting. We basically were there. We were on this, we were on this ranch owned by an Africana who wanted to, he did this thing called preservation for profit was his idea where basically he was like, look, during a drought, all the cattle die, but indigenous animals, of course, don't die because they basically forage in the morning when there's dew on the leaves.

Starting point is 00:47:12 And then the mid-afternoon, they're in the shade. So basically, what we were there to do is to prove his idea that indigenous animals were better adapted to the environment than domesticated animals, which is completely obvious, but in science you have to sort of prove it. So we studied them morphologically, which was biologically when they, and then we also looked at them and their behavior patterns during the day. And I mean, it was, it was fascinating because basically we just use this, you know, I learned the scientific method and we did real serious research and real charting and real, you know, and the next year was Alaska when I went to Prince William Sound. And the beauty of that was the textbook. The only textbook we had was Origin of Species.

Starting point is 00:47:57 And each, every two days, we had to read another chapter of Origin of Species and discuss it. And over the six, seven weeks I was out in the bush, that was the whole class. I had read that your time, I suppose, acting as a field biologist or doing field biology in Kenya changed how you looked at the world. Now, I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I don't know if that's accurate or not, but if that is true, how did it change how you looked at things? Everything changes in your life all the time. Right. But back at that age, when you're 16 and you're a Brooklyn kid from New York City, who's basically, you know, you know, a concrete jungle flea.

Starting point is 00:48:36 And you're suddenly in, you know, the savannah of Kenya. Of course, it's going to change your life. So it's a little bit of an overstatement, I think. But I mean, every day was mind blowing. As an embarrassing moment, I was 16. So you have to forgive me. I got off the plane and I was riding with the professors to the thing. I was like, oh, when are we going to see tigers? They're like, there aren't any tigers in Africa. They're in Asia. I was like, oh. That's what I meant. So, you know, a kid from Brooklyn, no idea what was going on. So, I mean, every day it was just, every day literally was something I

Starting point is 00:49:14 had never seen before. And then in Alaska, and you know, this is a pre-Google, pre-crazy media age, you know, still only 11 channels on the station. A couple of people had cable, but early days of civilization. And, um, I remember we were kayaking. It was an amazing trip. It was like five weeks in kayaks out in Prince William sound, one of the most untouched places on the planet at that point until Exxon showed up and we And we were going to this glacier and I had never seen a glacier. Now everyone's seen a glacier at this point because of that, the calving ice

Starting point is 00:49:51 and what's happening to the glaciers. But the idea of blue ice for a kid from Brooklyn, when I ended like this Chinego Glacier, the first time I saw it, it was like two miles long, you know, half a mile tall. I mean, I just, with huge chunks of ice falling and you'd see the chunks fall off. And then a minute later, you'd hear the sound because of the distance, like at a ballpark. And then these huge waves from that start coming at you.

Starting point is 00:50:20 And you're in a kayak, so you're really close to the water. And on those waves are icebergs with seals hauled out, regulating their temperature on it, going up and down. I mean, just like who needs psychedelics? You've been called controversial. I don't know if you view yourself that way, but I'd love to talk a little bit about how to respond to public perception and criticism another mutual friend of ours rick rubin fantastic guy uh incredible music producer uh among the greatest yeah he has said on this podcast he said the best the best art i'm paraphrasing but the best art divides the audience and so i think it was uh help me out here i think it was variety the day after you got a 30 minute standing ovation said you should quit filmmaking and go to therapy instead and uh you've had as

Starting point is 00:51:19 anybody who's in the public arena uh has a fair amount of say criticism of various types. Yeah. What would your advice be to a filmmaker you think is very promising, who's doing something that is not, that doesn't fit cleanly in the widget factory. Yeah. They're probably going to catch fire,

Starting point is 00:51:40 but they haven't had the experience. What would you say to a person? That's an easy answer. Keep going. You know, that's what you want. I mean, I, when I meet, uh, when I teach, I like my, both my parents were teachers. And so I, it's in the blood and I love teaching. You know, the thing I try to instill in students is like, the only thing you have to offer is you, you know, your individual stories, your individual perception, your individual humanity, and figuring out a way to communicate that humanity to the, to humanity at large. I mean, that's the beauty of cinema. Once again, that you can have a six-year-old Iranian girl

Starting point is 00:52:14 or a 90-year-old British gentleman, and you can have an equal emotional experience if the filmmaker does their job right to it. So like for me, it would be, you know, a ballerina and a wrestler. Hopefully, can I make you feel their blood and their pain? That's the goal. Because that's, you know, that's one of the great things cinema does is to bring us into other human experiences. So if it's truthful to who you are and you're concerned about how people are going to react to it, you know, stick up your middle finger and charge straight into that fire. You have to, if you're trying to be a provocateur, just to be a provocateur, you know, go F yourself. You know, that to me is, that's the bad stuff is like when it's not real. So for me, it's not, it's never like, oh shit, how do I, you know, mess around with people? That's not why I make movies at all. I, I'm just though it's just really gentle romantic movie about a guy

Starting point is 00:53:26 coming to terms with dying. I guess that's just not a very commercial idea in the West. But I thought it was at the time and I was like dancing around for five years telling studios that people would be interested in the movie because I really believed it. I wasn't, I'm not interested, you know, I happen to be a filmmaker who wants to talk to audiences. I love it. I love when they respond. Unfortunately, I haven't done a comedy or something that's easy, quite easier to connect with an audience, not easier to make by any means. I just mean, you know, when you're going to, when you're aiming to please an audience, it's a lot easier to make it than when you're just making something that you feel inside. And for me, it's not a conscious thing.

Starting point is 00:54:10 It's purely from my gut. That's the core for me. It comes from my stomach always. It's not the heart. It's mostly or it might be somewhere between. I don't know. What's right here? Solar plexus?

Starting point is 00:54:20 It's right beneath the solar plexus. It's kind of the stomach, I guess. It's like your large intestine. Oh, great. No, I don't know. It's kind of the stomach, I guess. It's like your large intestine. Oh, great. No, I don't know. It would be like diaphragm, diaphragm, solar plexus. It's basically there. It's that area.

Starting point is 00:54:32 When I feel, when I'm writing and it's like coming out of there, I know it's like some type of chi energy from there. Do you pay a lot of attention to your kinesthetic response to what you're doing when you're writing? I mean, it's that unconscious state where you're not feeling body that's the that's the state to get into we're just coming out of you you know and and that it's not by by no means is that often you know i i believe there are writers out there um i was very, I know some real writers and I think they get into that state a lot easier. And I'm not a real writer, but sometimes I have ideas that I want to get out and express. And so I try to do it. Why do you say you're not a real writer?

Starting point is 00:55:19 I mean, there are people who would argue you have writing credits. I don't know. I mean, I just, I guess I'm in awe of, I have some friends that really write and I see the way they can put words together. I don't, you know, look, the reality, I'm being more truthful with Ferris than I've been with probably anyone. The reality is I was a public school kid from Brooklyn and they never really taught me how to write.

Starting point is 00:55:53 And when I got to college, I went into the creative writing class and I almost flunked out of it because I really did not know how to write an essay. I didn't even, to this day, my son, my 11-year-old son knows more about pronouns and nouns and sentence structure. I just never learned grammar. It was never taught to me. And it was a shame. I just never learned grammar. It was never taught to me. And, and then, and it was a shame. I just never, I never did the Romeo. So I probably have some type of insecurity about that. Cause I don't think I could write that. I can write dialogue cause I have an ear and, and I, and I do have some ideas that I can try to sketch out, but I don't really, um, you know, I guess I'm scared of, I'm scared. You're going to give me an essay to write because that's going to be a challenging one. I'm going to be the last person to give you an

Starting point is 00:56:28 essay to write. My, my, uh, writing my senior thesis in college, which is mandatory and it constitutes a huge part of your departmental grade for the entire time that you were at school. Yeah. Traumatized me so much that I pledged to myself when I graduated, I would never write anything longer than an email ever again. Clearly it did not work out. Uh, it worked out, but it didn't work out as planned, I guess. What was your thesis on? My thesis was on the phonetic and semantic acquisition of Chinese characters in the Japanese language called kanji by native English speakers. So how do native English speakers most effectively acquire both the

Starting point is 00:57:11 meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters? Unbelievable. Yeah. In retrospect. It doesn't seem like someone who's afraid of writing would write something like that. That's pretty... You know had a lot of my true interests were buried in some of these early writing projects or even scientific assignments that I then felt were trivial or not serious for some reason and now I'm coming back to them 20 years later amazing I mean I remember I took a neuroscience class initially Initially, the plan was to

Starting point is 00:57:45 be a neuroscience major. I actually was a psychology major focusing on neuroscience for a host of reasons, moved to the language acquisition. Namely, principally, I couldn't do the animal testing that was required to be part of the lab I wanted to be part of. Yeah. I mean, I will say, I mean, I understand the sensitivity of the subject. I do think some studies are very difficult to do or impossible to do without certain animal modeling but let me just say that for instance one of the studies i've been deep into this no i know you are oh i know you are no i know you are i know you are i don't want to no not for environmental reasons just i know i oh for sure i have a well we'll talk about it later no we can yeah we can definitely talk about it. But where I became, I was really fascinated by REM sleep

Starting point is 00:58:27 and some of the physiological similarities to states that can be induced with hallucinogens. Oh, wow. And so this was probably my sophomore year in college that I was really fascinated by this. And it only took 20 years, 25 years to come back to it full circle. Did you ever try to stay awake for a long time? I stayed awake and this is not advisable at all. I love the disclaimers.

Starting point is 00:58:55 Well, you know, because every once in a while I'll get an email from somebody like, my cousin tried what you said and he gave himself a headache. And I'm like, yeah like yeah you gotta use your common sense people but i stayed away for six days oh wow i wanted to see what would happen because i had read these reports of people having all sorts of odd phenomena crop up when you stay awake for that period of time and uh so i used uh stimulants nothing illegal, but was very good at concocting, putting together these cocktails for myself and stayed awake for five and a half, six days. I stopped because I was walking on campus. I remember very clearly where I was.

Starting point is 00:59:40 And you were naked. No, I was naked. And there were goblins everywhere uh no i fell asleep while i was walking and woke up about a block later oh wow and i had crossed two or three oh wow and i was like you know what this is no longer a good idea but you have you stayed awake for a really long period of time no no i had a um there was a test when I was in undergrad and my roommate did it where he basically was to stay awake and he just became cruel. And I remember him telling me like, they were like, he's like, I'm going to go to sleep.

Starting point is 01:00:12 They're like, don't go to sleep. So he took a deck of cards and started throwing cards around the room and made everyone run around and pick them up. Otherwise he would go to sleep. So he started doing like really messing with the aides and the grad students that were doing the studies on him. Yeah. But of course, the overnighter and those are important, not just, you know, when you're in college and stuff.

Starting point is 01:00:31 But I'm glad you are out there exploring it for us. Yeah, I don't. The conclusion is don't do that. Yeah. The conclusion is don't do that. And if you remove sleep and food from people, they get really, really grumpy. It turns out. This is a quote from New York Magazine. This may have been from a while ago. Although I don't think it's that old, actually. So I think when I was starting out as a filmmaker, I had tremendous focus, but I don't think I robbed myself of too much life.

Starting point is 01:01:02 I'm still friends with the guys I grew up with in nursery school i have a great relationship my family i'm definitely attracted to balanced symmetry i'm definitely an ordered personality but i'm a lot less ordered than i was god damn i said some stupid shit so you can definitely deny you can correct you can set the record straight but this is of incredible interest to me because many people who would aspire to be creative or who self-describe as creative burn themselves out or they sacrifice family relationships by being singularly focused. And sometimes they're proud of it. Sometimes they regret it. But this is something that I don't hear very often yeah so i was wondering if you could just elaborate on that because how do you have how do you have the

Starting point is 01:01:50 tremendous focus required to do what you've done while still right having that balance and symmetry I mean, it is a balancing act and, you know, but I think all the time you put into life, you know, into family and into friends and into activities outside of the work, you know, back to our procrastinate, not to say hanging out with your family is procrastination, but bringing in those other experiences into your life is what makes you be able to relate to people and to communicate. And at least for filmmaking, that's a major part is, you know, going to a diner with friends and seeing an argument between some strangers over there ends up in a movie for me. You know, living life and seeing stuff and doing all different types of experiences through this planet is important to be a storyteller because it's all about the stories. I mean, I think the first three, four films of my career and definitely all my short films before that all came out of very personal experiences of my life. And the problem is if you keep working nonstop and you're originating your material, I think it's different if you're more of a journeyman who's going along and then

Starting point is 01:03:14 just taking your craft and bringing it to life, bringing a great script to life. Because I think- What do you mean by that as a journeyman? Well, something that's not a personal story by nature i mean i think every story is personal or you can find a personal way because anytime you portray a character on screen you should sort of infuse them with real emotions and stuff so and to do that you have to feel it yourself but um if you're drawing on your own life and your own stories and you're somehow more autobiographical somehow even even through metaphor. Cause I think all my films are not about, I'm not a ballerina yet. You know, there's a lot of Natalie

Starting point is 01:03:53 in me. I mean that character, Nina and me, not Natalie, but Nina, the character, I'm not a wrestler, but Randy the Ram, I I'm pretty connected to, and I understand why he makes every decision and some of those stories in there I can relate to or are drawn from my own life. So I think, you know, if it's an assignment where you don't really, you're just showing up as a director and you're there to, you know, make all the departments work together and make the actors do it. I think it becomes more of a craft then. Not to say that it's not an art, but I think if you're trying to create your own stories that are coming out of life, you have to actually live life to do it, you know? Otherwise, you're just getting your stories. I don't know where you could get your stories from. I guess you can make things about being an obsessive film, which is

Starting point is 01:04:46 kind of like, you know, one of my favorite filmmakers, Fellini, started making films about directors making films, you know. Or adaptation. I mean, eventually he went off and tell the things, but for a while, that's what he worked on. And so I think you have to balance. In this art form,

Starting point is 01:05:02 it's very different, I think, in different forms because other forms can be expressed in different ways. So I can't really speak for that. But storytelling, you need stories. Reminds me of something I was told at one point, which helped me at least, which was a friend of mine, a writer. I think it was, it might have been, it was either Debbie Millman, I want to say, or Maria Popova. And they said, if art imitates life, you have to have a life. Right. And I guess my follow-up question is when you are really immersed in a project and maybe,

Starting point is 01:05:38 maybe now with family and so on, it's different than in the early days, but my experience and part of the risk I have when I go into a project is that it tends to crowd out other things. Do you schedule, say, time with friends and family so that they don't get displaced? How do you ensure that that happens? Or are you just programmed in such a way that it's natural? It's not a bad life as a filmmaker because basically, at least the way my schedule is, I do a film every two, three years. So in that two, three years, there'll be like a 50, 60 day run, which will be completely selfish and completely committed and dedicated to the film where I'm working 18, 20 hour days over and over again, insane amount of time. And, you know, you get one day off on the weekend and

Starting point is 01:06:33 then the next day you're probably prepping. Um, although I'm able now to almost get two days off because I've been doing it enough that I kind of have more skills that I can go in. So I can get a weekend off sometimes, but where I can spend with family and friends, not that I could go out and party and have a beer. I mean, it's gotta be very mellow. And most of the time I'll just want to watch Game of Thrones, but that's a huge marathon that only happens once every two, three years. And then you get into editing and it's basically a nine to five job. You know, there's always things coming up, but it's a much slower pace. And that could be a 40 week process.

Starting point is 01:07:12 Then you get to selling the film, which is kind of a two, three week kind of marathon of travel. But it's kind of fun because that's where a lot of stories come from because you see all these different cultures and you just see a lot of crazy shit. So it's not that bad and then and then i get into development and when i'm in development for the next project it's once again i can really shape that around uh my son's schedule and and and i can have time to see my friends and have experiences and travel and stuff like that because when you're developing it's all virtual virtual in your head not quite in a computer but it's it's all virtual, virtual in your head, not quite in a computer, but it's, it's all in your imagination for a while. And all you need is a notepad and a pen and you

Starting point is 01:07:51 could be anywhere. Are there any particular resources? And I'm sure this is a question you've had a lot. So I apologize in advance, but I haven't heard the answer. So to aspiring filmmakers, let's just assume intelligent, driven, organized. So a big assumption, but let's just assume they check those three boxes. Are there any particular books or resources or approaches that you would suggest they take? Assuming that they want to put together some type of narrative storytelling, not doing a document necessarily. I always push The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. It's very good, but it's only for people who are writing screenplays. But he's great. He basically

Starting point is 01:08:31 took Joseph Campbell's work and turned it into screenplay language. And he did a really good job at it. And we're totally part of his cult because I believe in that hero's journey. And not to say that's the end all to end all. And there are other ways to approach it. But it's a very, very interesting structure that can really lead to big breakthroughs when you're struggling. You can look at the different archetypes that there are. And often you find yourself falling into it. And, you know, it's funny.

Starting point is 01:09:00 Like Requiem for a Dream, when I was working on it, it was before I read Vogler. But now that I look back, I was doing stuff similar where I was charting out where their emotion was the characters. And what was interesting is that the graph was actually upside down. When something good was supposed to happen, something bad was happening. And I was looking at it and one day I flipped it over and I said, oh, they're actually the bad guys, all my characters. The good guy is addiction. And this is actually a hero's journey of addiction overcoming the human spirit. And that's when I finally understood what the movie was about. And charting it and using hero's Journey is how I was able to figure out that idea out that this

Starting point is 01:09:45 invisible monster, this craving was actually the hero of the film. But that's great. I mean, and then the other thing back on what we talked about is, you know, tell your story. Don't try to figure out what people want because the reality is, you know, and I kind of learned this when I was coming out of film school, I went to support my friend, Scott Silver, who's a big screenwriter now who had directed a film that was at Sundance. And it was the year that Welcome to Dollhouse was there and a bunch of other indie gems. And I remember watching these films go, these are such specific, unique movies, but they're done exquisitely well. And what Sundance allowed me to believe and what independent film has allowed so many

Starting point is 01:10:31 dreamers to believe is that if you make a film well, no matter how personal it is, if it's truthful, you'll find an audience. So not to invoke the name of Rick again again but i was having a conversation with with rick recently in a barrel sauna that is the exact replica of his barrel sauna and we were talking about this deadline that i continually uh i'm actually working hard on the book but i i spent a lot of time talking i spent a lot of time talking about how hard I'm working on the book. And I was asking him some questions about working with musicians and whether he knows if something has hit the mark or not. And I'm going to paraphrase here, but he said effectively, great is always better than now.

Starting point is 01:11:22 And that's interesting. And and then the way i interpreted that was you know there's always a good time for great there's never a good time for mediocre so if you feel like you're rushed to hit some kind of deadline obviously reality is a production and so on don't get me wrong but uh yeah you can't rush you can't rush that's you know i mean rick's filled of wisdom yeah and it always comes out so interesting. But yeah, I get that. You can't force it.

Starting point is 01:11:59 The thread I want to tease a little bit is something you mentioned earlier, which is, say, the argument between the strangers in the diner that then makes it into your movie. Right. Could you tell us, or tell me, since I'm just sitting right here, about your history with the game of Go? I got into it a lot when I was doing Pi. I needed a game for the two guys to be playing so that they had some reason that they were meeting so that Max and his mentor could meet. And I just thought playing chess was just, we've seen it so much and it's cliche and mathematicians playing chess was just not quite interesting enough. And at that point, 97 Go was still very much a fringe game, sort of is still. But I think it was much more fringe then. new york go chapter um meetings which were like 18 very intellectual people and very book line departments at different houses each week playing go so it was a great cast of

Starting point is 01:12:55 characters justifying and they you know the best thing about go character go characters are the ones that have said that blow off chess as like a fool's game you know they they so look down on chess and it's just such a chip on their shoulder that they've they've graduated to go but that you know another thing that's fascinating that i've been hearing a lot of people i think actually rick was talking to me about it that's where i heard it was well he's the one who suggested i asked you oh there you go but the documentary which i haven't seen yet he told me there's some documentary about what it meant this computer finally beating these Go Masters. And he was telling me about a scene where after the first move, the Go Master gets up and walks away.

Starting point is 01:13:35 Because basically, I guess the point was that it's such a radical way to change of how the game is played, how this computer is playing it, that it's actually affecting now how humans play each other. And that's a line about AI that is interesting where it actually changes the way we act with each other after thousands of years of playing a game a certain way. Suddenly, this idea comes that is a moment of genius that changes the way we look at the board that was interesting idea and is that from a that's from a documentary i believe so but you have to ask rick i'll ask rick because i fascinate me and i i was i've been thinking about it for since so that yeah i don't want to take us totally off the rails but i play go uh i have a go board at my house i'm not good yeah uh i tend to play

Starting point is 01:14:27 a highbrow version of connect four which is connect five i my brother and i love to play we just call it connect five or something like that where we use a go board and it seems really childish but my brother's i mean he's he's a statistics phd very good chess player oh wow and these games can actually last a really really long so it's just basically getting five in a row and you could place them anywhere on the board sounds great yeah it's a great yeah and it can it can take you don't flip tiles or anything it's just about blocking that's right you just you leave them there so you're not capturing well you are capturing territory but the rules are completely different from real go yeah my my son came home from math class with that on paper and we played it for a while and i was like wow this is complicated game

Starting point is 01:15:07 super complicated and go is so fascinating on many many levels one of which is you can feel like you're winning and then effectively if you're if your pattern recognition is off in a handful of moves completely lose i mean it's it the tide can turn a lot faster uh i shouldn't say this with any degree of credibility because i know people like josh wade's gonna actually good at chess i'm not but uh the the game i got really into uh in japan so my first trip abroad was a year in japan as an exchange student at a japanese school lived with the japanese family and i listened to the session you did with the knife maker oh yeah murray carter oh murray's amazing so i want to get some of his knives the knives are incredible you should they're so good

Starting point is 01:15:56 uh the muteki line oh his stuff is amazing so the game i got into was called Shogi. So Shogi is Japanese chess. Oh, wow. And what makes Japanese chess different, and there are ways you can play Western chess this way, but you're able to reuse the captured pieces. Oh, interesting. And just drop them on the board at different places. And then also, not only do pawns get promoted,

Starting point is 01:16:21 there are multiple pieces that turn into completely different pieces. Oh, very cool. So get the pokemon of chess yeah yeah it's really a cool game and so there's a i used to buy these books in japan yeah tsume shogi tsume shogi is a basically books that allow you to it's like think of a really slow app it's a book where you you try to figure out the three or four moves in a given position necessary to win the game and then there's an answer key and so i would on the subway because you have a lot of time on the subway in tokyo at least i did i would either read comic books or i would look at these submission or i would read judo textbooks um but i mean i'm getting judo. Yeah. As an aside, it's funny. It was very upsetting when they got Wi-Fi on the New York City subway because now I have to work hard.

Starting point is 01:17:12 But like my rule is never take out your phone, not because I'm worried about getting stolen or anything, but just because that's the chance to watch people for me. And so you don't want to get lost in your device at that point. That's the great time. And rule in new york is great you know basically you can stare at anyone you want if they make eye contact with you you can never look at them again but you're allowed to look as long as they don't look at you and that's that people come to new york i said that's the rule you can you can watch and check each other out but if they realize you're being checked out stop so i i find it fascinating. And I imagine, yeah, the subways in Japan must be insane.

Starting point is 01:17:50 It's just, you know, once again, you know. Well, what shocked me about, I mean, there's so many things that are so alien about Japan for someone who hasn't been exposed to Japan specifically. Even in East Asia, and I've spent time in China. I've gone to school there. I've spent time in Taiwan. i've spent time in china i've gone to school there i've spent time in taiwan i've spent time in japan japan and within japan tokyo is just a particularly a particular brand of weird and so you get on the subway and i remember a couple of things really striking me because i'm 15 everything's backwards right we're driving on the opposite side of the street like we have to take a shower before we get into the bath and like all these rules that seem very alice in wonderland topsy-turvy yeah and then i sit down

Starting point is 01:18:30 on the subway and you'll see you know these salarymen salaryman who are on their way to work these worker bees and they're reading comic books with the most explicit porn imaginable and they're completely nonchalant about it yeah i mean tentacle porn who knows and then the the other hilarious Phenomena I bumped into which I really didn't expect so you hear about in Japan perverts on the subways and they're definitely perverts on the Subways and they're called chikung. So if you're like chicken chicken, that means a pervert pervert Oh really? And so if like some guys trying to fondle some girls ass ass like you'll hear chikan and then there's a big kerfuffle what they don't tell you is that uh remember one day i

Starting point is 01:19:11 was in my chikan and kerfuffle in one sentence just so you know might be the first time uh the singularity is near and i was in my school uniform 15 clearly a high school student right have my judo uniform over my shoulder it's wrapped up and i'm standing up it's packed subway and i fear i feel someone groping my ass oh wow and i'm like what is going on here i can't turn around because it's so crowded yeah geez and eventually i'm able to turn around and what do i see not what i expect i see two really old women with like half of their teeth with captain gold chuckling to themselves because they'd been grabbing my ass and these women are called obataryang so obataryang is from old battalion which it's a long story but it refers

Starting point is 01:20:01 to like older japanese women who just don't give a fuck anymore. And so, yeah, it was a real cultural experience. My favorite, you know, when I went to Japan for the first time, which was with Pi, you know, I was a big, huge fan of, I dreamt for so long to go to Tokyo. And I was like, you know, I kind of want to make a statement here. I kind of, you know, I want to be remembered. You know, I'm coming with this little film. What can I do? So I dyed my hair purple. And I came and I do an interviews the whole time with big,

Starting point is 01:20:34 bright purple hair and no one mentions it. And I get to my last interview and it's kind of a young, hip guy who's like a pop star in Japan and we become buddies. And I'm like, man, you know, like I've made my hair purple, but no one's commented on it. And he goes, here, come to the window. We look outside, and it's a major intersection. He says, who has purple hair out there? All the old ladies dye their hair purple. That's true. And I'm like, oh, oops.

Starting point is 01:21:03 That's totally true. 100% accurate. Oh, my God. I didn't even piece it together. That's totally true. 100% accurate. Oh my God, I didn't even piece it together. That's true, I'm having flashbacks. I think the old ladies are grabbing my hand. It's like, you know, in Requiem for a Dream, they dyed their hair red and out there it's purple. So, very funny.

Starting point is 01:21:18 So, speaking of tentacle porn, that's about as graceful a segue as I can make. And we don't have to talk about this if you don't want to, but this is that's about as graceful a segue as i can make and we we don't have to talk about this if you don't want to but this is one of the bullets that was recommended for me to talk to you about and i should preface this by saying in my second book for our body there are two chapters on female orgasm two on various aspects of male sexuality so i'm not shy about talking about this but suddenly i'm on the howard stern show suddenly you're on the howard stern show restricting ejaculation i don't have any context for this

Starting point is 01:21:51 but i was told to ask you about restricting ejaculation wow where'd you get that from my sources cannot be named uh but is that something that you can tell us about um i'm not sure what you're referencing oh oh i think oh there we go it's coming back to me oh it was funny i had it i had a um well there's in in uh requiem for a dream there's something in the background called month of fury um which was i guess it was early self-help um i had uh when i wow this is going way back and actually kind of flows a little bit into probably why um we're a growing friendship is happening here because uh it's similar roots in a certain way but when i my first when i was in film school and there's another great thing for young film students to know is like, there's usually the

Starting point is 01:22:45 first screenplay you write that will never get made. And believe me, that happens. And at a certain point, you have to take the bold step to abandon it, you know, because there's a learning process in that first script. And I worked on a script that was set in Coney Island. And I had a guy, a really talented kid I grew up with who probably if he went to Wall Street would be a hundred millionaire type of guy. But he ended up getting involved in this kind of culty organization that are those guys who go around and sell roses and little toys around the streets wearing ties. I don't know if you ever see them. They're a lot on the West Coast and they're basically kind of pyramid schemes where you

Starting point is 01:23:25 basically open up an office and you hire like 10, 20-year-old kids and they go and they hustle for you. And then you buy it from a guy above you. And then if you get a few, you slowly move up this type of thing. And they have these huge conventions in Vegas where they all come together and they have all these chants where they juice each other up and get all excited. And when I was in film school, he was in the West Coast area. And so I just sort of studied it and hung out with him. Once again, here's another play, hang out with a friend, but also kind of get stories. So I developed this whole kind of characters and world for this movie about this.

Starting point is 01:24:00 And eventually I didn't make that film, but I was able to take that character. And when I had to bring Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream Alive, Sarah Goldfarb, the old lady watched a lot of TV, but we couldn't afford the TV to put TV on the channel. So I decided to make my own TV show and create kind of a Tony Robbins-esque because Tony was just starting and he didn't sort of evolve into the kind of figure he is now. At the time he was sort of a tele, no one really knew what it was and it was odd. So I kind of created my own sort of version of that and had this guy on TV and I had to give him a philosophy. So I had an actor friend who was also a boxer and he had this thing called

Starting point is 01:24:41 Month of Fury. Eddie Deharp is his name and it was three rules which are actually three great rules it was 30 days uh no refined sugar 30 days no red meat and 30 days no orgasm now are those all together yeah you do all three for a month for 30 days and it was actually a very interesting you know so so he preached it to me because he would do it before he would box or one more time no refined sugar no refined sugar so that's everything like toothpaste anywhere where there could be sugar you know no red meat and then no orgasm so in the movie wrecking for a dream the third one is not actually pitched because i just thought it would be good as a little secret.

Starting point is 01:25:25 Now I'm sort of giving it away, although it's come out of it. It's actually in there. It's actually in there a bit. It's an Easter egg that's hidden in the film somewhere. It was funny because when we started working on it, I suggested to the actors that they should go on a month of fury before we make the movie just to understand what it is to withdraw which is a big part of the movie because it's hard if you're not a drug addict or a smoker you know to actually stop something for 30 days to fast as you talked about to it's it's really

Starting point is 01:25:59 tricky and here were three things that were seemingly not hard to do. And it was funny to, you know, run and see my actors at day 24 and 25 wanting to kill me, you know. Hence the month of fury. Yeah. And I have another friend, my best buddy, who actually on day 29 ended up proposing to a woman, which I was like, you never propose on day 29. What are you out of your freaking mind? The month of Fury. The Month of Fury, we called it. So if I ever did a self-help, that would be, you know, hey, if you want to co-write it and start a movement,

Starting point is 01:26:32 I know you got the sales. The Month of Fury. All right, you heard it here first, folks. I could get, I think, quite a few people to participate in the Month of Fury. It's actually very effective. I'd love to ask quite a few questions about the new film. But the first is related to the writing of the film. So when you are writing a film like Mother, and there are many, and I don't want to give anything away, but many visual components.

Starting point is 01:26:59 How do you write that type of material? Being the writer and then the director, I can sort of not worry about that that much. But there are two different steps. I think first you're writing and you're following along the emotional truth of the characters and following scene by scene what's going on and watching the story unfold. And then there's the next stage at a certain point, you kind of hang up most of your writing cap because you can always rewrite if you're the writer, but then you start to become the director and start to think about blocking and movement. And that was a very, very big deal in this film. Can you define blocking just for people who don't know? Blocking, yeah, sure. Blocking is basically just how actors move in a scene. That's all it is. But it's really, truly a big part of the work because for a lot of reasons. First, you want to create blocking that's organic and natural to what the actors are doing makes sense with what their objective is in the scene or what they're doing in the scene or what they're not doing in the scene or what they're hiding in the scene.

Starting point is 01:28:08 So you kind of want to think about what that is all about. Then there's a second tier, which is as the filmmaker, you're trying to make it as economical as possible, meaning as few setups, as few times to move the camera as possible because every time you have to sort of change where the camera is, you have to change the lighting and that just takes time and you want to get as much time shooting as possible. So you're trying to figure out blocking that works best for the simplest amount of technical problems, unless you're really trying to do something technically super challenging stuff. So you try to balance those and, you know, and it's kind of a balance because sometimes you'll tell the actor, oh,

Starting point is 01:28:50 can you help me out here with blocking? Because it means we have to do less. But sometimes you don't want to get in their way and you want them to be creatively free. So you want to give them an open playground to play around in where they can do and move. So it's all, it's, it's, it's a balancing act. Um, but, but it's a big part of it. So at a certain point, you know, when the script is done and in the case of mother, I was actually lucky enough to have a three and a half month rehearsal period where basically, um, I convinced Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem and Michelle Pfeiffer and then Harris to join me in a warehouse out in East Brooklyn, where we basically taped out the set and got, we would work on the scenes and then we'd get up on our feet and we would just start to block them. And then in the last

Starting point is 01:29:35 two weeks of that three and a half month long process, I actually brought in my cameraman and we shot the entire movie, moving the camera on, on video as kind of homework and then which was really fascinating because you figure out all different types of problems like oh how's the camera going to get from it's it's a constant moving handheld camera so how am i going to get the camera from here to there because there's a wall there um and and that's that suddenly started to play into action. And for this film, it was a very, very restricted visual language. That was part of one of the challenges I put in front of myself. Normally, you'll have a wide shot in a movie. And the nice thing about a wide shot is if an actor somehow does something that's not – that's like dramatically new, emotionally new.

Starting point is 01:30:24 Or if they decide to comb their hair a different way in each take. If you go out to a wide shot, basically the illusion is broken for a moment because the viewer's eyes have to take in more or a different part of a scene or there's other things to look at so that when you pop back into a close-up, you can get away, cheat almost what's happening and no one would ever notice. In the case of my film, since there was no wide shots, it was extremely challenging. I mean, the only shots in the film are either over Jennifer Lawrence's shoulder on Jennifer Lawrence's face or her point of view, which means what she's

Starting point is 01:31:01 looking at. That's the only coverage in the entire film so that's why this edit has been you know almost a year-long cut because i had such a limited amount of language to work with and i had to make every moment by moment by moment work even though that's not really happening in real time why did you choose to use that constraint i find i feel like i could talk to you about constraints and rules for a really long time yeah because you mentioned theory yeah the month of fury yeah exactly just get progressively more belligerent and you talked about say having lunch scheduled for after the difficult meeting you talked and then you have say shooting over max's shoulder yeah yeah yeah and different ways of as you put it sort of limiting your visual palette why why do that well i think i think coming out starting as an independent filmmaker with very limited resources uh makes you be very very you know try you

Starting point is 01:32:00 strategically have to figure out economical means to basically take advantage of all the limited resources you have. So I ended up actually stylistically creating techniques that actually turn those limited economics into a stylistic choice. So I've always been preaching that boundaries are the most important thing in any form of an art. You know, I mean, when you're a painter, you have the boundaries of a canvas and the limitation of your colors. And I think it's extremely important to do the same in filmmaking and to make real choices about how you want to do those limits. Sometimes they're self-imposed. I have less of the economic issues, although always you have to be very economically responsible for it, for what you're doing. But I went really extreme on this film, which was like, I basically said,

Starting point is 01:32:55 there's three shots for every scene, which is an incredibly low amount of shots that I would normally do, um do in a movie. And it just became an interesting exercise and experiment. And, you know, and there were times when Maddie, my DP was like, don't you want to, you know, like never does a character come between Jennifer and the camera. Yeah. No one ever crosses the line. I noticed that. Which is crazy because when we're doing crowd scenes with lots of people

Starting point is 01:33:26 you know it would be a lot easier to tell the story by having jen get lost in the crowd and crowd come through but no i was like my dp maddie was like why it could be and we talked about it for a while and and i and i was like no i think let's just remain orthodox here let's remain truthful to the intent and the one thing I was worried about, people would feel claustrophobic or bored by the style. And that doesn't seem to be the response. People aren't seeing those limitations. And I think that's because we just turned it into a language and into a style that people can understand. Is there something you hope audiences will respond with or walk out with? Did you have an objective? And this ties

Starting point is 01:34:08 into, I suppose, the genesis of the film as well. I don't actually know the origin story. Well, the origin story is hard because it's murky. I think it came out of these endless headlines, the endless stream of notifications on your telephone, the ability to scratch right beneath the surface of our kind of civilization and realize how many desperate and awful things are happening around the planet still in this, you know, pretty enlightened time. And there's a lot of rage and a lot of helplessness because like, what can I do? How can I stop this? And, you know, being an environmentalist when we're completely under assault, when, you know, what science is telling us is going on. And the same people that use their smartphone every second and every minute of the day are the people who say, well, science isn't always right.

Starting point is 01:35:03 Yet, the product of science is in their pocket, you know, dominating their lives. Yet refusing to see what's going on. Like how could you not say, wow, there might be some connection going on. And I don't know. I come from a science background and I witnessed how little tiny small changes by man can deeply have huge effects very quickly that are out of control. You know, and then this new idea of these feedback loops, which isn't that new anymore, but these ideas that are becoming more idea that there's these tipping points where things are just going to start to accelerate, you know,

Starting point is 01:35:41 and as a parent, I just sit there and I go, oh my gosh, I look at the beauty of my child and want them, forget about having a job, having a freaking atmosphere and having the ability to, I mean, it's just crazy to ever think he'll see a really an elephant in the wild and in any type of wilderness way. I mean, I guess Prince William Sound was very much wilderness when I was a kid. And something happened to me when I was in Prince William Sound, I had a, we were kayaking, as I said, for weeks,

Starting point is 01:36:14 and I was eating a granola bar and the wrapper fell into the water. It was like a foil wrapper. And I freaked out. I like stopped, I tried to, it just went right under. And because of that guilt of that, I still, when I see trash on a beach, I pick it up for that foil. You know, it's like that, that guilt has carried me. And I, because at that time it very much felt untouched. Like I was the, one of the first humans to ever experience it. There isn't a place on the planet anymore, not because of pollution only, but because of climate change that isn't affected by humans. There is nowhere on the planet that is true wilderness as it was 60 years ago. You know, when I was writing a Western and I realized,

Starting point is 01:36:59 you know, it was set in 1883, I think, if every single person on the planet disappeared, dropped dead, was abducted or whatever at that point in time, besides some forged metals, belt buckles, horseshoes, bullets, guns, everything, every remnant of humanity would be gone in a century, you know, completely gone because everything was built out of earth materials. And then you suddenly have all these freakish new materials where every single bag of Lay's potato chip you have is something that's around for 10,000 years longer, particles that are part of us. And you can't escape it.

Starting point is 01:37:38 And so quickly from my childhood where there still was places on the planet that weren't really feeling any impact to now where it's all changed. It's scary that people are just completely denying it and turning their backs on it. And out of that, just, you know, I just want to howl. It's like, you know, I felt the Ginsburg howl and I just wanted to howl. And I guess it's my howl. What is the Ginsburg howl? Alan Ginsberg's, the poem Howl. Ah, got it's my howl. What is the Ginsberg howl?

Starting point is 01:38:05 Allen Ginsberg's, the poem Howl. Ah, got it. All right, sorry. I'm betraying my lack of education. That one you should read. That one's great. All right. Yeah, I mean, but it's basically, you know, it was a cry from the 60s, you know, of like

Starting point is 01:38:16 what, for his generation, or at least that's the way I took it. How would you like people to go into the movie? And who should go see the movie? Like now, now the obvious commercial answer might be everyone everyone yeah well i think look i think you got to know you're going into a roller coaster ride and it's like you know when you get to the amusement park and you see that loop the loop and you're like no freaking way you should prop you should be ready for it i mean yeah and no matter how much i prep you and tim can tell you

Starting point is 01:38:46 it goes there so right i mean it's yes it's intense and it's very intense so if you want an intense different ride if you're you know you want to see something different at the at the cinema you know please come on down um i i think i, I, you know, that's what we tried to do was make, make a very unique rollercoaster, except, you know, it may go off the tracks and into the concrete wall, but I can't really be, I don't want to be responsible for that, but that's what happens. But I, I mean, I just want to, I think it works on a lot of levels. Um, I was always like thinking it was going to be really scary and, you know, tilting into the horror genre. You know, Jen Lawrence, when she saw it, actually thought it

Starting point is 01:39:32 was incredibly beautiful and moving, that there was a beauty to it. And I've heard that reflected in a lot of ways. And so, it's definitely not your normal night at the movie it's it's but it's the type of movie that you go see and and everyone will have something to say about it i think um and hopefully they're not too many profane words directed in my direction well it could be profane but modifying something good also yeah there's that yeah I'd like to ask about the sound. Yeah. So I have read that, well, a few things. That A, a lot of independent films or films in general fail from poor audio quality.

Starting point is 01:40:17 That was a big thing I realized very young in my career was like, this is a pretty good movie, but something's off. And it was always a sound and the sound in this movie and in a and i mean in in more than one of your films certainly is uh very i'm searching for the right words but very visceral very pronounced and uh i i only read this other expression after the fact after i saw the movie movie, but that thinking of music or the sound as an additional character. Yeah. Could you elaborate on that? Because I've never paid so much attention to sound in a film.

Starting point is 01:40:59 I think it's, well, you saw a slightly unfinished, only the first half of the film was kind of really dialed in. So it's going to get better, I hope. That's what we're supposed to be doing as we speak. You know, sound design for me is a huge tool and I got totally turned on when I was a young kid. I saw a documentary on the guys who did the sound design for Star Wars and they were out in the desert banging on wires, making lightsaber sounds. And it blew my mind. I was like, oh, wow, you know, that's such a cool idea that you can use any sound to do this. And matching up sound and image, you can really mess around.

Starting point is 01:41:33 So I've always been fascinated by that. But, you know, since I make these films where I really am trying to make the audience have a visceral experience with the character, in this case, Jennifer Lawrence's character. I try to draw the audience into her subjective point of view by, you know, creating a soundscape that starts off realistic, but then as things sort of shift and get more and more insane, becomes more and more expressive and expressionistic. I love the fact that people are going to be able to see this in theaters for a lot of reasons. And I want to connect this to something else that I read about you, which relates to the

Starting point is 01:42:14 historical lack of compliance to widget making. So the story of you shooting Natalie Portman black swan in the subway at something like three in the morning without necessary permits without her having signed a contract how do you and i don't know nearly as many filmmakers as you do but i know a few yeah how do you get away with it i mean you meaning like you seem to be, and this is from the outside looking in, but to make the art you want to make and bend the rules or do things like that. Why is that? Are there certain sort of contractual decisions or conversations you've had that allow you to do it? Did you set the precedent as like a problem child early so that they're just like, oh, it's fucking Darren.

Starting point is 01:43:00 So you get away with it? I mean, it's just a project. I don't think, you know, it's never meant to be abusive. No, no, I'm not calling you that guy. No, no, no, but I'm just saying. I think that's the reality is it's not abusive. It's about the work. It's always about the work.

Starting point is 01:43:17 And I think if you can relay back to that, that this is about, you know, us bringing this to life in the best way. And I think there are people that would take that line of argument and turn it into abuse or push the line to something that's not safe or fair. And I think I'm pretty empathetic to other people's feelings, maybe to a fault, because I think some directors, it's kind of helpful sometimes to push past some of that pain and be blind to it. But that's never, that's just not my character. I can't do it. I feel when people are uncomfortable very easily. And it makes me probably better as a director to read performance, but it probably gets me less than what I always need because I feel sorry sometimes. I have mercy, I guess. How dare you? But I think, though, that when it's the work, you go for it and people get excited by that.

Starting point is 01:44:16 And if you're actually being truthful about that, it's okay. But there are times and places where I've tried to do too much and people pointed out to me, Hey, that's probably, you know, it's not fair for these reasons. And I hear that. And, and then I just listened to myself, if that's the truth or not. If you have that conversation and it doesn't feel true to you, is that the, is that one of the primary causes of walking from potential projects or like what and i guess all of this is sort of coalescing into a question of if you were talking to a very promising new director let's say director maybe they're a writer director but they direct and you wanted to prevent them from getting chewed up or corrupted by the system is there any particular career advice that you would give to them? It's a good question. I mean, I mean, you know, you got to be doing it. I'm always from

Starting point is 01:45:09 the school. You got to do it because you have to do it, but you don't have any other choice, but to do it. Just recently I ran into a filmmaker and he was sort of complaining and whining about doing a TV show because you really wanted to be making films and that, and then, but you know what? My advice to him was not just stick with your gut and do what you want. I could tell he was the type of guy that should be doing that TV show because I could see like he was, he was already past that point where he had crossed and he was just going to, so I was like, do it. But then you find people who just, you know, want to do what they do.

Starting point is 01:45:50 And then you just want to support them and give them as much love and support to get it. Because they're trying their hardest to do something that only they can do. Now, does that mean, for instance, I've heard this advice with writing that writing, you should only write, say a book. If it's easier for you to write the book than to not write the book.

Starting point is 01:46:15 Like it has to be that much of a kind of compulsion. I don't think it's ever easier to make a movie than not make a movie. I guess maybe just sort of from a personal right pain pleasure standpoint like i remember reading an anecdote and i don't think again who knows it's the internet but about you i actually think this might have been from the new yorker uh about a diary entry where you were talking about a rave in thailand and you were, the sun came up and the people were dancing and the sun came down and the people were dancing and the tides went out and I was miserable because I wasn't making movies. Yeah, that's true. That means you have to make movies, right? I mean,

Starting point is 01:46:54 it seems to me. Yeah, I mean, I guess so. I mean, I think for me, it was storytelling more than films. Although I think there were definitely things in my past and experience that, you know, helped me like very early on. I got into photography, into black and white photography when I was in junior high school and I would, you know, go into the dark room and develop the film. I loved it. And I don't know why that fell into my lap. It just so happened they had this lab nearby and I was able to take a class there. And then I just started thinking about photographs and taking pictures and all that. And that all led to this. But I think it could have gone anyway.

Starting point is 01:47:34 It's funny because when I was in college, I didn't know what I wanted to do the first couple of years I was in college. I hadn't discovered filmmaking until I was a junior in college. And I remember walking around hitting myself in the head going, Oh, I'm never going to find what I want. I'm never going to find my calling, you know? And then it happens for you, hopefully. And it happened for me. I found something that I, it was the first time I ever got an A in college was filmmaking.

Starting point is 01:48:00 I was a B minus student until film came along and suddenly boom it was like something that kept me out of my girlfriend's room you know i was like i'd rather be rather be cutting the movie than laying in bed so i was like um you know i found it but uh i think eventually it comes and but it could have been a lot of things i think i don't think necessarily like i mean it's this weird kind of weird art form and it could probably come to me in lots of different ways it was just something that I was like okay I see a path I see something there and it's interesting and fascinating and there's a lot to learn in there and so I just went for it if I were to ask say some of your closest friends

Starting point is 01:48:42 what your superpower is maybe you wouldn't talk about it because you seem to be a pretty understated humble guy but what your superpower is or what makes you different what would they say or what might they say well i mean my friend dan is like who's doing does visual effects for me it was i met him first day of freshman year of college says you know when people ask me if you changed i I say, you know what? He was an asshole in college and he's still an asshole. But I think that's my breath telling me that. That's what old breaths are for. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I don't know. It's hard. It's hard for me to say, but definitely one of the best things about my life is, uh, as I talked about there is I still hang out with the guys I went to nursery school.

Starting point is 01:49:26 I still hang out with the guys I went to high school with. I still hang out with the guys I went to college with. And I think that having the roots, like I'm into roots. I'm into loyalty. And I think that's – and I work with the same filmmakers pretty much. And I think – I don't know. I had – my friend Jed once said that the guy who dies with the most friends wins i thought that was pretty good advice if i were to pester your

Starting point is 01:49:52 friends a little bit more give them a few drinks yeah and they get past the obligatory he's still an asshole he's always been an asshole if they're if they got to like the point of drunk reminiscing and sort of the emotional point of drunkenness, what would they attribute your success to? A lot of, I mean, more people don't make it than make it in the film business. Whew, it's a good question. What would you attribute it to?

Starting point is 01:50:21 We could make it direct to. I mean, it's a combination. I mean, I had excellent parents that, you know, almost always supported me and always told me that not to work so hard, not to work too hard. You know, when I would say I got to go work, they'd say, well, don't work too hard. It was their saying. I mean, that was after I got out of college. So up to college, they put, they were both school teachers and academics was super important. But they also created a lot of, they created very good responsibility and boundaries, but also didn't necessarily create opportunities, but gave me breathing room with support to find opportunities. So I struggled in my 20 twenties, but I was able to

Starting point is 01:51:07 struggle in my twenties. Um, and so that, that was, that was, I think a big part was having that type of, um, support system and my sister. So family was a major part of it. And I think that allowed me to have persistence, you know, um, always say is nine-tenths of the game is persistence. Is, you know, you got to get up to the plate, you know, to get that chance to take that swing. And to get to the plate just takes a lot of work. But then, and then when you get there, it's preparation and homework. Having done all your homework and as well as you can, as much as you can. And then as you're taking the swing, make it a responsible swing for the team.

Starting point is 01:51:55 Make sure that that – I love the baseball metaphor. I wonder how much longer I keep going. With your students you teach, what is the name of the class? I don't do it regularly because I haven't found the best place. I taught at NYU for a bit and a few other places. But I mean, I just, to be honest, I kind of wing it to see what kids are doing. You know, I'll come in, I'll talk to them about what their dreams are, what their projects are. I'll ask,

Starting point is 01:52:25 they all sort of share. So I have them all describe each other's stuff. But I love doing scene study with kids where I have them put up a scene and bring work with actors, put up a scene. Now this is a, this is a scene that has already appeared. No, no, no, no. A scene from their projects. They describe it to me. They tell me what they want. They'll put up the scene and then I'll teach them. I'll give them my direction on how I would block it.

Starting point is 01:52:49 I'll work with the actors. I'll just show them my process and then I'll take a chalkboard out and I'll show them, how do we shoot it? And I'll just draw my designs to show them how to draw it. So I give them a sense.

Starting point is 01:52:59 And the chalkboard is sort of bird's eye view. It's always bird's eye view. That's how I've always, I came up, I mean, I know the filmmakers do it it but it was when i was 20 years old starting to do films that's how i started i always and it's probably from playing dungeons and dragons as a kid is like you know you got that sky view and like i drew little triangles and i came up with all these different shapes and forms

Starting point is 01:53:21 i have my own like language that i've developed over the years for how to do it and i have the ability to look at that architectural plans and then to see it in 3d below so i can that's how i do it i do it very much from a bird eye view dungeons and dragons will be for round two i was i was always a chaotic good cleric gray elf you were gray elf yeah you're a cleric no no i i i don't remember that well actually i mean we played forever yeah but i i don't actually remember my character i'll bring some graph paper next time exactly uh if you were to this is related to the class let's just say you could no longer make films yeah all right and your sort of divinely assigned mission was to coach five to ten filmmakers. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:08 And not only would you get the psychic reward of seeing them do well, but much like, say, someone who bankrolls a poker player, you would get a percentage of the future. What are the things you would focus on if you had, say, a six-month period? Well, I mean, if I was doing that and I had a share of it yeah i mean that as soon as you bring the share into it it's like uh all right so we could we could we could we could approach this a couple different ways so one is you get the profit share right so it's like a 50 50 split with them plus you have a kicker but you have to add some money in all right we could do that i would never do that okay i'm not i this is this film

Starting point is 01:54:45 investment's an awful investment this is of course that's what we have huge chinese companies for but the uh the other could be really whatever award you would want to get out of it so it could be the acclaim and receiving awards and prizes and so on it could be anything else i mean really i mean the real i guess the mean, the gift of any teacher is to see, uh, whatever the goals of the student are, as long as they're righteous goals be achieved, you know? So, you know, I would probably want to teach students that were, you know, probably had just wanted to tell good stories and And then I would want them to see them make them as well as they could, and then have them connect with as many people as they could.

Starting point is 01:55:32 The awards, the money, that's all silly stuff. I mean, it's great for everything, but it's really has as many issues with it as good things. So, um, I mean, it's, it's just, you want to find people and I'd want to find students that really just want to tell stories and entertain. And they, not that they want to be a filmmaker because we're the, um, rock star of the present day or the NBA basketball player of the day, you know, where it's because that's what they want to do. Like when I started telling stories, it wasn't like when I was a kid, no one knew what Spielberg did. We heard the name Lucas and Spielberg, but that was it,

Starting point is 01:56:13 you know, but not really, you know, no one, how do you become a director? And when I started to do it, even in the early nineties, it wasn't really,

Starting point is 01:56:22 it was early Sundance days. It wasn't really this track record of how to do it so I wasn't like looking for the reason to be you know that it could lead to something that was clear it was just something that was interesting and fascinating to me so at this point when there are all these paths to you know um fame and money and all that. And, you know, if you make one film, you can go and do a Marvel movie or something like that, which is happening all the time. Now, I think you want to find people that are looking to tell the stories and then help them tell stories. And like when I, the last class I taught at NYU, my best student was a Turkish kid who was going

Starting point is 01:57:03 back to Turkey to tell a small story about an apple tree on the side of Mount Ararat that starts a village fight. And tiny story. It could be huge. Who knows? But he was serious and he just wanted to tell that story. And so I gravitated to him and I spent most of my time in the class working with him to help him because he was the guy who was going to go make a movie and was serious and knew what he was doing. And I said, let me focus on this kid. So the other kids can see, be inspired by his path. Any top scripts. If somebody has never read a screenplay and you're like, look, just start, start with ABC. I mean, the guys working today, Eric Roth, Scott Silver, read any of their scripts, the great writers, Chris Terrio.

Starting point is 01:57:50 I mean, there's a lot of great writers working right now. I mean, there's a lot of good, great scripts that I've read. I mean, Charlie Kaufman's scripts are great and fun to read. It's enough to start with. Yeah, I think so. Where can people find the film? Where should they learn more about it? I've never had something produce.

Starting point is 01:58:09 Yes, exactly. Oh. And I've had, just for everybody listening, I highly recommend you check it out. Like Darren said, like know you're signing up for a roller coaster. Yeah. But I've had nothing produce this really unique, I'll get yelled at for modifying unique by someone I know, but that's okay. Just for him, very unique, dreamlike state for about 18 hours afterwards. That's amazing.

Starting point is 01:58:35 Yeah, it was really profound. But where can people learn more about it? Well, I mean, it's mother with a low case m and an exclamation point point which causes all different type of difficulties with social media because of the exclamation point but um i mean by the time this comes out i hope uh it's going to be around um if not um you know um that i mean just google mother movie and you'll you'll be seeing a bunch about it about it i. Where can people, if they want to check you out on social media or website or anything else, how can they say hi? Both my full name, Darren Aronofsky, at on Instagram and Twitter.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Yeah, that's, you know, Instagram is pretty cool. I've been doing this cool thing. I don't know if you've been following it, but I found two young film students and they were moving out to go to film school in LA. And I rented them a big projector and a cube truck. And they'd been driving through the country, projecting the word mother in different languages onto all different types of structures around the country. And so I've been posting these, these beautiful images that these young filmmakers have been making, um, to help

Starting point is 01:59:44 self-promote my film, but also, um, to help self promote my film, but also, um, it's, it's been a fun project to learn about all these different places all over America. It's kind of humans of New York. Uh, is that humans of, is that the name of the humans in New York, but, um, more projections of mother. Very cool. So people can say hi to you on the interwebs and check it out uh any last uh asks or recommendations of the people listening besides seeing the movie i mean just keep uh keep seeing the weird stuff go out and you know let you know support when you and then spread the word you know so i think you know if you dig the movie get it out there and get everyone to go see it i'm hoping that it's the type of film that you'll want to talk to other people about well i will i can attest certainly with the people i saw with we talked about for hours afterwards so

Starting point is 02:00:36 one of the things i really enjoyed is that it does not follow the typical template any typical template yeah that i can that I can see. So it leads to a lot of conversation. Dare to be different. Dare to be different. Yeah. Well, Darren, I really appreciate the time. Thank you, Tim.

Starting point is 02:00:53 It's been amazing. Yeah, this has been really fun. We can keep going, but I want to let you get back to- Next film. Yeah. Next film and polishing up everything. Yes. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything

Starting point is 02:01:05 we've discussed, including the movie, books, and so on in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast as per usual in every other episode. And until next time, thank you for listening. Bye-bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include

Starting point is 02:01:42 favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which I've used for many, many years. I absolutely love audiobooks, and they are one of

Starting point is 02:02:25 my favorite ways to pass the time when I travel. I'm on the road all the time, and Audible allows me to consume many more books than I possibly could otherwise. I have two audiobooks to recommend right off the bat. The first is perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time, and it's the only audiobook I've wanted to listen to twice in a row. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's amazing and you will thank me. There are a few different versions. I like the version that Neil narrates himself. One of the most soothing voices of all time. The second book is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, P-O-T-T-S, which had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what would later become the 4-Hhour workweek. So go to audible.com forward slash Tim, and you can choose one of

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Starting point is 02:03:54 And the lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mollenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. The very first episode in particular is amazing. The second, I took a ton of notes on, so you should check it out. But WordPress, where do I even begin? I mean, the New Yorker uses it. Jay-Z, Beyonce, they use it. FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, Time. Whether you are looking to create a personal blog, a business site, both, neither, something else, you'll make a huge impact when you build your website on wordpress.com. And directly from some friends at Google, I'm not going to quote them by name,

Starting point is 02:04:33 but they say that WordPress offers the best out of the box SEO, the search engine optimization imaginable. So if you're on WordPress, you immediately have a leg up on everybody else on search engines and so forth. In my experience, I'm no medical doctor of search engine optimization, but I will say that I used WordPress for years and fell in love with it to the extent that I became very close friends with Matt and then became an investor slash advisor to Automatic, which runs WordPress.com. That is how much I believe in this. And that's how a lot of my most successful products and investments have come about because I'm in love with X and then I seek out X. Nearly 30% of the internet is run on WordPress. And that includes everything from the huge sites that I

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #263: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — Exploring Creativity, Ignoring Critics, and Making Art

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