The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep. 10: Brian Koppelman, co-writer/producer of Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, The Illusionist, etc.

Episode Date: June 3, 2014

Brian Koppelman is a screenwriter, novelist, director, and producer. He is best known as the co-writer of Ocean's Thirteen and Rounders, as well as a producer of The Illusionist and The Lucky Ones. He has directed films including Solitary Man (Michael Douglas).In his episode, we discuss how he got started, how he handles rejection, his big breaks, his creative process, and much, much more.Show notes and links at http://www.fourhourblog.com Just search "Koppelman"Brian can be found on Twitter at @briankoppelman. Enjoy! Tim***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. So we got three, two, one. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Try that again. Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. It was going to be The Tim Ferriss Experience, but then Joe Rogan would think I was copying him, so it sounds even more egotistical, but it is The Tim Ferriss Show. The guest we have with us today is Brian Kaufman. Brian, how are you? I'm great, man. Just great. So pleased to be here talking to you. Yeah, it's been a while. I'm very excited to reconnect. And I've been thinking a lot about your craft. I follow you on Twitter. Some of your exchanges are hilarious. It's kind of like

half screenwriting, half Knicks, I would say. I try to dial back. I think most people who are engaging with me on Twitter probably want to talk about creativity in some way. And then there's this fanatical core of the people who were with me at the beginning who were there partially because I wrote about and talked about the nicks a lot. So I try to warn people like, hey, there's going to be a Knicks rant for the next a little while, so stay away.

But I think it's probably now like 90% about creativity and 10% about the Knicks. No, you need to support the core, the people who were there in the beginning. So we met quite a few years ago, I would say at this point. I remember our first in-person meeting was in New York City. For those people who don't know your work, or they probably do know your work, but

they're not familiar with how you were involved with these various films, maybe you could just give people a very brief overview of some of the types of movies you've worked on and just the type of work that you do, if that's a sensible way to start. Sure. I am a writer, director, and producer of mostly films and television as well. Some of the movies on which I've worked in at least one of those capacities are Rounders, Solitary Man, Runaway Jury, Ocean's 13, The Illusionist. I have a TV show that we're going to shoot in the fall for Showtime called Billions.

And, you know, Tim, there's IMDb out there. The folks can go if they want to. No, of course. I don't want to go line by line through your IMDb or the Wikipedia. I just think that it's what's always been so interesting to me, and we'll come back to sort of theing the needle, starting as a writer, and then moving to, you know, producing and directing. And I guess we met, how long ago would it have been when we first started chatting? You know, it was before you were starting to write for our body the first time that we met. And I also should say that I've, like you, I entered just a little before you the world

of podcasting. And I have a podcast on Grantland called The Moment with Brian Koppelman. And that's something that I'm devoting a good amount of time to as well. So, you know, it's not just writing, directing, producing. I'm also talking to Bill Michael. He can also talk. And I remember a stand-up comedian once...

It all ties into, Tim, this idea, and when you asked, I think that there was a question behind your statement that a lot, not many, that most people you run across sort of end up in one thing. And I think what unifies every part of my

own, my journey at this stuff is I always lead with my curiosity or obsession or fascination. And that's been something that I kind of codified for myself a long time ago so that I see it all as one big endeavor, which is chasing down that which I'm curious about and finding a way to satisfy that. So if it's storytelling and there's something that is something that we should write, and I write most of it with my partner, David Levine, make movies with him too, you know, sometimes that doesn't fully scratch the itch or the way we see the story. And that means we have to find a way to direct it or produce it. And then it's just a matter of figuring out what the tactics are to bring that about. No, definitely. And I want to focus on a lot of the tactics in our

conversation today. The first place I thought we might start, just as it relates to obviously pursuing your passion, because similarly, I feel like many people chase happiness, and I put that in quotation marks in my head, whereas if they were to simply pursue what excites them, the happiness, the well-being part often kind of takes care of itself. In your case, I saw a bit of an exchange that you pointed me to yesterday on Twitter about Rounders. And I really enjoyed Rounders and even more so enjoyed it having since now spent a little bit of time with poker players in the last six months. And I wanted to hear a little bit about how that movie came to be because it doesn't appear that uh everybody at the agencies and elsewhere were jumping up and and sort of throwing confetti in the air

when you first met with them uh so i was hoping you could give some backstory yeah that's pretty true i mean um what the thing i i tweeted um brian compliment on twitter the thing that i i tweeted um was that the screenplay for Rounders that my partner David Lean and I wrote was rejected by every single agency in town. When I say that, you may think that it's hyperbole or an exaggeration, but I mean CAA, Endeavor, William Morris, ICM, UTA, APA, every single agency rejected it within a span of four days

because there was a young manager who believed in it. He was like, I'm going to get you guys an agent. When you're young and starting out, and I wasn't even that young, I was 30, you hold on to the words of anybody who even has the most tenuous connection to the business.

So he said, you're going to have an agent. And so I was so hyper-focused, and I would write down, waiting for the call that was going to be, hey, they loved it. So I wrote down everything that everybody said. And it's out of a Hollywood movie about the movie business because the first person would say, you know, Tom in Endeavor says it's overwritten. I don't know what that means, but what I do know is that he would then say, and Spencer at William Morris says it's underwritten. Like, I have this. I have it a piece of paper.

You got to put the vowels back in, right? Right. So it was really dispiriting, man. And the thing was a labor of love. And I think, by the way, one thing to illustrate this idea you were talking about of what excites me and curiosity, and that is when you said we met however many years ago,

I mean, we met because I just out of the blue found you because I was really curious and fascinated by what you did. And I don't even know how I chased you down, but I somehow found you through people. And I don't even know how I chased you down, but I somehow found you through people. And I said, if you're ever in New York, I want to take you to lunch. And something about, and by the way,

I had no game plan, right? I just wanted to meet you because I thought, I bet you in this exchange, there's a way that both of us can come away with a little bit more knowledge and with a little bit of an understanding of a different world. And that's like always my North Star. And so even on Rounders, I was in love with poker. I had become sort of like a degenerate card player.

I was 30 years old. I was unhappy with the life I was living. When I went to this one poker club in New York City, heard the way the people spoke, saw the way they looked, I realized, okay, that's a movie. I'm obsessed enough with this world and with the idea of making movies that I'm ready to turn my life upside down. I went to my wife and my best friend Dave, my wife Amy, my best friend Dave,

and made a plan to be able to continue to work but to write this script in the mornings. Amy cleared out a storage space under the apartment we were living in. Dave and I at the time had no contacts in the movie business, and we met two hours every single morning. We didn't miss a morning. I think we took Sundays off, but other than that, we didn't miss a morning. And we worked for two hours.

He was bartending. I was going to my job. And that two hours in the morning, nothing else was going on. There was a slop sink in this little storage area, room for one chair. I'd sit on the floor. Dave would sit at the typewriter most of the time. We had a stack of books that was like reading material about poker and the language of the game. And we'd sit in that room and write.

And then at night, we'd go to these poker clubs and try to collect data, lines that people said, stories that they told us, character traits. And with no thought that it was realistic or unrealistic, we didn't calculate any of it except how can we write a screenplay that we believe could be the basis for a movie that would be like what Diner was for us, a movie that people at the time, I was probably thinking about guys in their 20s, would, if we could get it made, would want to just quote to each other. And it would be like the thing that was their little secret private movie. And that if we could do that, we'd succeeded.

And so we finished it and we really thought that we'd kind of captured it. And then that initial wave of rejection was blazing. But I have to tell you, it wasn't crushing. Because I'd lived through it in a prior life. And I'm happy to talk about it, but I was in the music business before, and on both sides of it being a seller and a buyer in the music business,

and watched experts be wrong over and over again. And it taught me that there's a value in listening to the experts, hearing their reasons, but the step that a lot of people miss is a dispassionate evaluation of the reasons. And that if you can dispassionately evaluate the reasons for rejection and find them with merit, you can address them. Without merit, you can ignore them. And I learned to think that way when I was in my early 20s. So that although it always stings, it's always emotionally dispiriting when you face rejection. If you can step back and kind of make

an analysis and a game plan, you can then find a path forward. And that's what we did. So in the case of, of rounders, I love these stories. And almost everyone that I've, uh, almost every single person I know in Silicon Valley, for instance, uh, who's, who's seemingly had overnight success. And this is perhaps the cliched counterpart, but they, they have an equivalent of the sitting in the basement story and they have an equivalent of the sitting in the basement story. And they have an equivalent of the experts telling them, we either hate your idea, we hate you, or both. Or like, oh, that's an interesting company idea. We think it's terrible, but we like you, so why don't you completely change the business and then maybe we'll consider supporting you. It's very common, actually. Love the team, hate the idea. And in this particular case, just to, because this is

something I've always found, and I quite frankly still find so befuddling about entertainment, is the roles and responsibilities of people with different titles. So in the case of a manager, because it's, I don't have an entertainment manager. I've spoken to tons of them. Do not have an agent. I've spoken to many of them do not have an agent i've spoken to many many of them uh but what what i'm curious about is how did you decide uh to get a manager in the beginning well that was just a lucky so david my my partner when when uh out of college went out to la and got a job as an assistant and was, I guess, planning to be a novelist and maybe a screenwriter.

And when, David, who you know, when he left L.A. after a couple years realizing, in his mind, working in the business would make it harder to break into the business, to really get the time to go do the writing he needed to do. But he somehow met somebody who met somebody who knew a 24-year-old kid who basically hung a shingle that said manager, which is really an advisor. And he'd sold the kid, Seth is his name, had sold one TV movie or something. And so it was, like I said, that's why I said he had a tenuous connection. He was a guy who was starting out also.

But one thing about Hollywood, it's a land of self-invention. And so if you decide you're a manager, you're a manager. You have to be committed to it. That's how it is. Read What Makes Sammy Run. What Makes Sammy Run, is that a novel? It's the Bud Schulberg book. It's a legendary book about how somebody, it's a legendary book

about how somebody makes their way in Hollywood. But what I'd say is that, so this young manager, we needed an agent because really agents are the ones who have the contacts to be able to sell something.

In the end, though, the manager said, you know, I believe in this anyway. And he had known some people on his very low beginning level at a couple of production companies, producers. And he got the script to some of those, and we had some rejections. And then some producer tried to get us the option to do it for free. And all along, we had to kind of keep our own sense of the project's merit in a way of its intrinsic what we felt its intrinsic value was and so but finally the right producer came along and gave it to somebody at

Miramax and then they were willing to step up and there was this great moment early on where they wanted to option it and I was was flying in Las Vegas working. I was in the music business still with an artist. And I had all the cell phones, and Dave couldn't reach me. And David said, no, you can't option it. He just had a moment of clarity where he said, you know what? You can buy it or walk away. But he knew somehow that what we had was good enough that we should make them commit to buying it,

which meant they had to spend a lot more money and would make it more likely that they would actually want to make the movie. You know, my experience before that was... Oh, the suspense is killing me. So did that gambit work out? Yeah. I like it.

Okay. Miramax, in fact, he told me on a cell phone at Las Vegas airport. I was like, you really did that? He goes, yeah, I did it. So our guys are going back and saying, you know, you have to pay them, you know, real money. We're like six figures, you know, which at the time for us was just a fortune of money. Yeah. You know, enough that the initial thing would have, we each would walk away with six figures or something. And then by the time I landed in LA, Miramax had already come back and said, yes. And then we were in, you know, we were really, um, we were really

in business. How did you or the manager with the shingle get in touch with the producer who then got it to the right person at Miramax? Well, Seth had networked in in Hollywood, the manager. He was out there and he had done all the things of going to the right bars. I mean, becoming an assistant in Hollywood is still a great way to make contacts and I think he worked his way up to the mail room at one of the places and met enough people that look we weren't getting him you know he wasn't getting the script to sort of like

top level folks but ultimately he did get it you know far enough. Now from the music business well I'm trying to what I've always been fascinated by are writing duos. And I want to come back to the sort of the process of making a movie because, quite frankly, it's something, like you know, I've been thinking about for a long time. But how do you work with David?

Because I've met other writing duos, for instance, the Freakonomics guys. And there are these sort of wonder twins who put out really good work. And I have no idea how I would ever work with a writing partner, not because I couldn't do it. I just don't know how you would even format such a thing. So when you guys were sitting down in the basement or in the storage room, what did the process look like? What did you do over those two hours? That's a great question. It's shifted over the years, the ways in which we've worked. What we did back then was we together outlined it.

We'd gone to these clubs and, like I said, did a tremendous amount of research so that we understood who the people were. Then we spent a lot of time talking about the story. So we kind of tell each other the story, you know, do a bunch of work trying to say, okay, who are these characters and how would they interact with each other? We want to tell it about the world of poker. And then we kind of together in talking invented these characters and then um and then i remember one of us dave and i never talked about who came up with what um but one

of us came up with this notion of um making uh the beginning of this movie it's like making rounders start where the cincinnati kid ended right at the end of the Cincinnati Kid, spoiler, skip 30 seconds if you don't know that movie that came out in 1963, but the Cincinnati Kid ends with Steve McQueen, the young guy, losing everything. And so our idea was, well, what if we start this right there?

This guy loses everything. And so then we outlined from that premise every scene of the movie. And so it was outlined in detail. And our rule from the beginning was we can deviate from the outline any time we have a better idea. But if we don't have a better idea, let's just stick to the outline because we can always revise, rewrite later.

And then we knew what each scene was supposed to be about, so we would just talk it back and forth because writing the movie dialogue is conversational. And so we would just talk it back and forth. Because writing the movie dialogue is conversational. And so we would just go back and forth. And if one of us had a better idea, all right, write those lines. Or I would say it, Dave would type it, or he would type it, get up, and I would type. And we really just kind of jammed it. Then at night in our separate worlds, we would each, when we felt like doing it, read through a bunch of pages, make notes.

So come in the next morning and right before we started go, hey, that scene we wrote, you know, on page 10, what if this happened instead of that line? And we, you know, because we've been, he and I have been like brothers since we were 14 and 15 years old. Right. We have a shorthand. We don't have any bullshit between us. So that there has never been an argument we've had that's been about sort of ego or about anybody feeling like the other guy

doesn't value his contributions. That's the key to a collaboration. We are each I think keenly grateful for what the other person brings. No, and I'm so envious of this on some level. And people ask me, for instance, are you working on a next book? And the answer is no because I find it so incredibly isolating to do it solo. And even if I have a team helping with design and research and things like that,

it can be a very, for me at least, psychologically traumatic experience being locked in. No, it's really hard. One of our movies, Solitary Man starring Michael Douglas, I wrote that movie alone. But now, here's the thing. I wrote it alone. David and I directed it together um and but i wrote it alone because when i'd written the beginning of it and read it to dave he said you know you have the voice for this this is personal to you for certain reasons you write the draft and then let's make the movie together and i felt i needed to uh

i felt he was right and uh because the 20 pages I'd written were very particular. And it took me so much longer than it would have taken for us to do it together. It was because we were making other movies along the way, but beyond that, not having him to bounce stuff off of, not having the benefit of his great ideas really made it a lonely battle. But I was able to finish it and then giving it to him and then getting the benefit of his wisdom to come be my partner and go make the movie was great and useful and something either of us should do again because then you have the other guy coming in and all his ideas can happen to take something that's basically finished and then take it to another level.

Right. And now, when I met with Sushi, the three of us, in New York City, I was so fascinated by the state of the industry and distribution. And we'll get to that in a second. But when did you become a producer? And what does that mean in the context of the films that you've been involved with as a producer? Because I'm sure like a lot of people, you see a film, you look at the credits, and you're like, holy shit, there are 15 producers. I have no idea what all these people are doing. So in the context of what you do, when did you decide to become a producer and what did that mean in terms of how you related to the content

and ultimately shared in the spoils or whatever? What shape did that take and what did it mean? Well, sometimes it's a vanity title, so you're right to recognize that when you watch a movie. Sometimes it just doesn't mean anything. But when the movies that we've been a producer on a movie, it's because

we either had the central idea that made it a movie or were able to connect people to one another. An example, and it's actually great because it's a few different things, is The Illusionist, which stars Edward Norton

and Paul Giamatti. Yeah, great movie. I love that movie. Thank you. And that's based on a short story called Eisenheim, The Illusionist by a brilliant guy

named Stephen Milhauser. And Dave and I had had that story. That story was in Best American Short Stories, 1989. And I carried that story around for like 13 years

and then said one day, Dave and I were with Neil Berger, a writer-director, and we'd helped him make his first teeny-tiny movie called Interview with the Assassin. And we're standing around outside his editing room and said, do you know the short story, I was like, I'm the illusionist, that should really be a movie. And he said, I do know it, I bet you I could figure out how to make it, because Dave and I couldn't figure out how to write that movie originally. We knew there was a

movie in it. We couldn't recognize it. So we said to Neil, hey, if you want to try to figure out how to write it, we'll produce it, meaning we'll acquire the short story, which we actually got for free for a year and a half. Then he paid a little bit of money to keep it going. We said, we'll sit with you, Neil, so that creatively you have us to bounce your ideas off of. And we will help you along to where there's a script that we all think can get made. And then we'll go and try to attach other elements, meaning actors, financial partners, and all that stuff. Now, that movie has done $100 million worldwide.

At the box office, not including DVD or video on demand. The real number is like $97.100 million worldwide. At the box office, not including DVD or video on demand. The real number is like $97.5 million worldwide. And I'll tell you, Tim, he was rejected at every stage by everybody in Hollywood. That's why I returned to this theme. I think it's really important. When I say, again, every studio had a chance to see that thing at the screenplay stage and again at the final movie stage.

Oh, sorry, screenplay stage? They all rejected it. At the stage where we had attached Edward and Paul, they all rejected it. And then when we finished it, even though we tested it, and it tested as high as a movie can test, one of the highest-testing movies of all time, meaning that the crowds objectively loved it and we did it, it was repeatable. We tested it in various different places. They all passed again.

And then it goes on to do 100. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. So how is it possible? What is the rationale that an exec would use for rejecting something after the stars are attached and you've had successful crowd testing. I like, I'm just trying to figure out besides being completely incompetent,

like what, there has to be some logic, however, however perverse. By and large, they take, they take comfort very often in decisions for which they can't be fired. Ah, yeah.

So passing on a magic movie set in Austria in the 1800s, that's pretty easy to pass on. Got it. So it's a you-never-get-fired-for-buying-IBM type of situation. Yeah, but you buy the illusionist and it fails.

The guy under you says, well, an imbecile bought a movie with people in capes doing magic tricks he's going to sell. I would never dream that. I'll make the next superhero movie. So that's very reductive, by the way. I'm being very reductive, right? These are actually smart people and they're thoughtful people. But there is groupthink. There is shallow thinking sometimes. And there is like herd mentality. And a lot of the time they're correct. It's very safe to say no.

But I'll just tell one more rejection story. And the reason I do it is because I find that on – one other thing, which is Hollywood's always trying to remake what was successful today. And they don't understand that what's successful – very often don't understand what's successful today isn't going to be successful a year from now. And so it's Mavericks who figure that out. And Maverick producers or smaller movie companies or the occasional you know brilliant woman who's the head of production but but but mostly they forget that it's a what's the technology term like a destructive technology disruptive disruptive they they forget that this is

disruptive technology and and that that all the time you, bridesmaids was a disruptive technology, right? The conventional wisdom was you can't put a movie with those women. A raunchy movie starring women doesn't work. Now somebody at Universal realized that was a faulty premise somehow. And so then that becomes the disruptive thing that leads to, you hope, a bunch of others. And then, of course, you get to the point where that no longer is going to work because that appetite's been sated. But believe me, they'll keep going after that until there's just nothing left in it for each kind of thing. And in the case of the short story, what was the approach that you used to, it sounds like,

option that for free? Sure. An option, just so I can clarify, is effectively a no-shop agreement, right? We have exclusive rights to try to develop this into a film for X period of time. And sometimes it has a B-side, which is, and then we guarantee

that if we develop it into a film, the author will receive a floor of X. Got it. And then for your production, our production, you might say, and a ceiling of Y, and those numbers might be percentages of the shooting budget of the film. I see, got it.

Do you want to say that a lot more, like, again? No, I got it. No, you understand it. You have the bare minimum the author is guaranteed and the maximum in sort of broad strokes as a percentage of the total production budget of the film. Exactly. And so sometimes you'll have to pay a little bit up front against those numbers, but we didn't. So here's what we did. At the time, I think we'd made one, perhaps two movies. Two. We'd been involved in two movies, Ben Rounders and Knock Ground Guys, and certainly weren't as far along in our career as we are now.

But, you know, one thing that gives people on the receiving end of it the confidence that you actually have the answer to the question that you're raising. So we found that the story was controlled by, I think William Morris, might have been ICM, and found the name of the woman who was in charge of those kind of subsidiary rights, they're called, of short stories. And we figured, actually, that whoever was doing that was probably a little bit junior

and was probably used to just getting faxes sent with requests. And we thought, you know, I bet you not that many people call her and ask if they can take her to lunch. Right, right. And so we were guys who made a couple of movies, and we called, and we said, can we take you to lunch? We have some stuff we want to talk about, and took her to lunch and walked her through our vision for this movie and explained that we, the truth, we're not really producers. We don't have development money. We don't have a fund.

We don't have backers. What we have is know-how and passion. And if you explain this to the author, and you know, we gave her this mission that she then could embrace as her own mission, which was I can go deliver to this author some great news, which is there are a

couple of guys who, while you're sleeping, Stephen Millhauser, are going to be doing everything they can to make something happen with your short story. She went away and got us, I think she got us a year and then another six months for free.

At which point we felt, because it was getting rejected and Neil was rewriting, we felt like it wasn't even fair to ask for more time free. Then it was only like $1,000, $1,500. It took us years. But over those years, we then added a partner at some point

when we thought we were maybe going to have to pay a little bit more. Neil Berger did all this work for free, wrote the script 15 times with our notes and going through it. But eventually, I mean, eventually everybody, everybody won. Um, I know this, I love, I love these stories. I do think there's perhaps one caveat that I'd love to get you to comment on a potential caveat. And that is, uh, there are people who could confuse getting rejected with being a solid indicator that their product is absolutely good.

So just because you get rejected doesn't mean your product is good, right? So I guess what I'm wondering is what signals do you pay attention to or are there projects that you've had rejected and eventually you're like, you know what? The signal is correct. Like this is not something I should pursue. I think the first thing I said at the beginning of this conversation about this area was you must do a dispassionate evaluation. Right?

I said there's this step. And the step that you try to take is, okay, that's a body blow that hurts. Yep. My emotional reaction is anger. Yep. And hurt. Now let me step back and dispassionately, to the best of my ability, dispassionately evaluate the rejection.

Is there something in that rejection that hits home in the secret place where I know the thing is flawed? Right. If it does, is that addressable? Mm-hmm. If it doesn't, are the fundamental things I believe about this still true? Okay, if they are, let's press on. If they're not, can we fix it?

If we can't, maybe that rejection is right. But you have to take it. This passion is really important because you have to know it's not a rejection of you, and you have to know, you have to be able to find a way to evaluate. But I will say, something I always think about and believe, it's a very fine line, for artists especially, between delusion and belief. And so many people believe, are deluded in the belief, that they're great, the work is great, and that everybody else is crazy. But somehow the problem is that the artists who succeed

also have that exact same narrative most of the time. Right, they're just eccentric and not crazy. Well, you know, they're crazy beliefs. But the story, the final sort of story in this little area, a rejection is, and I'll do this very quickly because I've told it before,

but when I was 21, really when I was 19, I discovered this, I was organizing a boycott of my college against investing the school's endowment into companies that did business in South Africa because apartheid was going on. And in organizing this stuff, I stumbled upon a singer-songwriter I wanted to play at this rally. That was Tracy Chapman and who a lot of our listeners are young in their 20s

who may not know Tracy became for a time the biggest singer-songwriter in the world and sold like 13 million albums and I worked with Tracy

I produced her demos and got so produced her demos worked with her my father was in the music business so I knew about the music business, so I knew about the music business. I knew people in the music business.

And I had Tracy. We signed her. People would come up from New York to watch her. I was in Boston. People would come up from New York to watch her perform. I would watch record company executive after record company executive watch her, be personally moved by it, sometimes get tears in their eyes because what she was singing about was so important and her voice was so beautiful.

And then they would say, can I please meet her? I just want to meet her. She's what an amazing, and I could see they weren't bullshitting me. They had a cathartic experience watching her perform. And they would walk me. I would walk them to their, I was at Toppsville. I would walk them to their car in winter before Topps and I would walk them to their car in winter before they drove back to New York

or to their hotel and they would look me in the eye and they would say, thank you for, and I'll always remember and then they would say, now you know, we can't possibly sign her at Columbia Records.

I was a kid, I was 20 by this point, probably a junior. I love you and I never want to see you again. And I would say, dude, I don't understand. Like, man, because I saw you crying, and she was playing Talk About a Revolution,

and baby, can I hold you tonight? And they go, yeah, but she's black. She seems a bit masculine, is what they would say, right? And I'd say, but can you see, like, those three or four or five hundred people who knew every word, even though there's no record out, there's no internet, there wasn't any internet, they'd just come to show yes, but it's college, it's bullshit,

and I'd go, I've traveled, and I had this part of how, to answer your question, how you know, I had traveled all over New England with her and watched her perform to any audience she performed to, ended up on their feet, and coming back again and again and again, and so I knew that these people were wrong, even though they were rationally correct, right? Because nobody like her had been successful.

It was totally against what was going on in music at the time. So because they were on the inside, all the defenses they had up were actually valid defenses that usually you ought to have up. They just couldn't understand that this was disruptive. I, because of my innocence, was able to understand that. But the lesson of that, then when it finally happened and we finally got her signed, the record company she signed to even told me, it's not going to sell any records, but it's the beginning of a career and all this stuff, even after playing in Fast Car.

And watching that happen and taking that ride, and by the way, I had a point on that album, and so I made a lot of money as a young man, certainly a lot of money for a 21-year-old. But watching that happen made me pretty indefatigable going forward when I truly believed in something. Because I've just watched experts absolutely buy into conventional wisdom and absolutely be wrong. But we all have blind spots. I've been wrong. You've been wrong. It's just that I don't think that there's a likelihood that if you are sane,

if you are, and if you're rigorous, if you are rigorous in your own R&D in whatever your area is, and you do your own testing, and you really stress test the thing that you do, I don't know, I think that gives you a tremendous amount of inner fortitude when you come up against the monolith. Definitely. And I think that once you've seen it once, you recognize it as a second and a third time.

And in the case of, of course, the four-hour workweek, I mean, that was rejected not even politely, I mean, very violently in, not even politely, I mean, very violently in 27, I think, in 27 cases or so. And then bought for a song, which they deserved because they were the only, that was the market price, right? I don't in any way hold it against them. They made a good decision and they got rewarded for it. But I'd love to get your advice very selfishly. And this is because for many reasons. I mean, number one, you're very qualified. Number two, this is something that's just been a bug in my brain for a long time.

And that is potentially turning the four-hour workweek into a film. And we've talked about this. I was inspired by our meeting in New York quite a long time ago in between books to go to the story seminar with Robert McKee. And I think that David might have recommended Save the Cat. I don't want to put words in his mouth. I think he might have. No, he wouldn't have recommended it.

I think you asked. I remember the conversation. I may have forced a strong-armed man into a book. I remember when you asked. You said, is there anything that sort of talks about what the conventional way you do it? There we go. All right. And I really think those books are pretty, I think all that stuff is pretty useless. So just to, so useless as they may be, I became fascinated by screenwriting at the very least and sort of put together a skeleton structure of what could become sort of an entertaining,

funny movie with philosophical takeaways, not completely unlike fight club, but to tracking the story and the backstory of the four hour work week. Now the, the reason nothing has happened with that, there are many, but one of them is that I've been scared senseless by all of the factors that can derail a promising project, right? It's like you have Edward Norton attached in this and the audience loves it. And still,

there are roadblocks and people who can derail the project. And in the case of TV, for instance, you know, I've been working on this, this TV show for the last year plus, close to a year and a half, if you really add in all the contract negotiation and everything else. But when you're operating with a partner that is a large company, like Turner in this case, there are all sorts of internal dynamics that can lead to delays and postponement, like the launch of this TV show. And it's been very, very frustrating for me as someone who likes to create, to see this work that I've put my heart and soul and sweat and tears into get postponed with no real sort of light in sight at the end. So I guess what I'm wondering is, if you were in my shoes,

how would you, in this day and age, with Kickstarter and all these different options, think of creating a feature film? How would you? Well, do you want to, Threshold, and all these different options, think of creating a feature film. How would you? Well, do you want to, Threshold, you know, do you, you want to write it, yes? I absolutely would want to have a very heavy role in. Well, then my advice to you is pretty analog, which is write it.

Okay, all right. Because the power is, I'll tell you, so David and I, along with Andrew Ross Sorkin, wrote this thing, Billions, that we're going to make for Showtime. And the standard way you would do it, if you were in our position, is you go, because, you know, when you've made some things,

now, at the sort of idea stage, we're not going to get rejected that often. The early stage, when their only outlay is to get you to write a script. So we'd a few different times gone to HBO and made deals with them to write a script, and then their shows didn't get made. And we were trying to figure out the way to have the highest probability of, once we decided that we didn't care, it's great to get the money to write a script, but that that wasn't primary.

What was most important to us was the real chance to go make the show. That's what matters, right? Absolutely, yeah, for sure. So we realized that if we rooted on spec, meaning speculatively, meaning without a deal in place, here's what we risked. We risked three months of our lives where we would have gotten paid a lot of, certainly a really good amount of money in the fourth quarter of a year, right,

and where opportunity costs were walking away from a lot of paying jobs, right? And we decided we're going to take three months, and we're going to, or at the time, I don't think we knew, it could have been any amount of time, a month to five months, we're going to write this script on spec so that we can either not sell it and then we've wasted this time, although we can talk about whether that's even a waste, but I don't think any of that's a waste, but essentially right from a business standpoint, we've wasted that time, or we would have leverage because if somebody wanted what was now concretized

in an actual script, and they wanted it, we could say, well, that's fine. You have to pay us, but more than that, you have to commit to making it. And that if you don't actually, if you're not committing right now to making it,

we're not going to sell it. And there's no way to get, there are people who get that without, it's very hard to get that without having the piece of material that's compelling. Because in your case, with a screenplay, a real screenplay that let's assume you write an excellent screenplay. You write it, you go to all your friends who do what I do, we all give you advice, you go take the notes,

you make it better. Make it better. Here's a great script. Well, now the world is open to you. Why? Because now you can go get the one thing that's the most valuable, which is a piece of talent attached to it. Now, if you have a... Because signing on... You can get a movie...

Let's say you get a movie star tomorrow to jump on to the 4-Hour Workweek. It's not a real commitment. Because the real movie stars aren't going to really sign on until it's a screenplay and they really see it manifested and really manifested as a story. But if you can manifest it as a story

and get a movie star, you have a movie. That's just binary. That's how that happens. Now, there's huge risk. The risk to that is to your time and your ego. That's all you're risking,

time and ego. And for me, in your shoes, knowing, because, you know, over the years, you've left me voicemail messages like three different times. Hey, I'm working on a screenplay. And then, you know, I don't hear from you again for five more months. Still working. I remember our conversation. Really excited to show you.

Which is great. I love getting those messages. It lets me know you're alive and happy. And I know I picture wine. I always picture a lot of wine involved. Yeah, those are probably my drunk dials to you, my drunk texting. Oh, God.

But I have to say that you want to do this, Tim. So you should, I mean, if I could just hear the advice you'd give somebody else, it's like, go write the script. Now, if you had a screenplay, we could sit for an hour and a half and devise seven different ways, for real, like, five to seven different ways to figure out how to go from a finished screenplay to a made movie, and how much control you could keep or would have to give up along the way depending on who and how you aligned different resources. But all of that starts from a finished screenplay. And to create that,

this is exactly what I need to hear, to create that screenplay, I know you do not have a very high opinion of a lot of the screenwriting books out there. However, I want to become good at the craft. I want to be educated, obviously. Is the best way to do that by reading— Your story about how you get good at anything, or Wade's story about how you get good at anything,

it's like by going to the source and figuring out what are people doing or misunderstanding about it. Like, how can I get better faster as your specialty? Right. And I would suggest to you that the ways in which people who've written those books talk about it is at best archaic and at worst wrong. Today, I did on my podcast, on the moment, I interviewed my friend John Hamburg, who wrote and directed I Love You, Man, and along came Polly, and he goes to meet the Fockers

and meet the parents. He's one of the biggest comedy writers in the business and directors. And he started talking about his approach to writing scenes. And I said to him, I was like, this is what every...

John Hamburg, a guy who just had nothing but success doing this, was talking about how he thinks about a scene and questions he asked himself before writing. And I thought, why didn't someone just put that in a fucking book? Like that's worth,

that's worth a million dollars. Like that's incredible. And so I, you know, I think what you need to do is, um, watch movies. And I said to him, how did you figure this out? And here's what he said. He said, I would watch a movie. I like five times, taking notes the whole time. I would stop. I would watch individual scenes and try to figure out why those individual scenes work. What is it that makes those individual scenes work? And I would really, he was like, I would really grind on it. And I would really take notes.

And I would really try to figure out each part of it. And then I'd do it again. And I think that that is more valuable, especially for you who are so good at looking at systems and figuring out where within those systems are the fulcrum. Where's the fulcrum? How does this turn? You're great at that, and I think that if I'm you, that's what I'm looking at. I mean, the first one of those six-second, you know, I do this thing called six-second screenwriting on Vine, and the very first one I did was all screenwriting books are bullshit.

You know, read screenplays, watch movies, and let them be your guide. And I still think that that's true. You know, if you're writing a conspiracy movie, watch Network. But don't watch it once. Watch Network seven times. Watch Network enough that you can start to understand where the scenes are and start to understand where the craft exists and how it's built. By the way, I'm very extreme about this because I think You're a militant screenwriter.

I just, yeah. Well, I wrote this blog post called The Screenwriting Instruction, The Con Men and the Screenwriting Instruction Industrial Complex. That is very extreme. Because, yeah, it's at briancoffman.com because I decided that I watch these people charging. A guy wants to go to Hollywood and try to become a screenwriter. $250 to that woman is a lot of money to give to somebody supposedly to teach her how to write genre.

And that person has never even sold a screenplay, much less had a movie made. At least Robert McKee, who I'm not... I can't rip McKee, because too many successful screenwriters, people I admire, say they got something out of his class. But I would say at least McKee has produced credits. Like, he's... Okay, there's a podcast by Craig Mazin and John August

called Script Notes. Those two guys between them have 20 movie credits, hit movies. Those two guys know what they're talking about. They're in the trenches making movies every day. This is a podcast you said, Script Notes? Script Notes. Oh, Script Notes. John August and Craig Mazin.

There are resources that are, and especially now, there are so many resources for people to look to that I think are more helpful than sort of maybe what used to be considered the thing to go to the Radisson and sit in some guy's seminar. Got it. And just as a starting point, are there screenplays that you recommend any aspiring screenwriter read, or is it very sort of target-specific? Well, I think that Tony Gilroy's screenplay for Michael Clayton is just a work of state-of-the-art, you know, state-of-the-art platinum screenplay. Got it. Because what he pulls off in that movie is so difficult to pull off. Yeah.

That kind of flawed hero who's still heroic, those plot mechanics, caring about those characters, and he writes like a dream. And, yeah, I would say that's a really great screenplay to read, for sure. I mean, Network by Patty Shansky, that's a great screenplay to read as well. And especially, you know, watch the movie and then read the screenplay. Yeah. And figure, you know, I mean, I definitely think those things. I mean, for you, I would read Jerry Maguire. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But I would not just, like, I know you know the movie, but I would try to figure out, like, I would watch the movie again because there are very clear storytelling devices that Cameron Crowe uses. And you can't find someone who makes movies with more heart and soul than Cameron Crowe, but that doesn't mean that the craft isn't exceptional also. But unconventional in certain ways. So if I'm you,

I'm looking at that movie and I'm watching it as often as I'm watching Fight Club. Because your story is sort of in between those things. No, definitely. Absolutely, 100% agreed. And I need to get on it. Well, that's good news. I'll be out in your neck of the woods on the East Coast,

so you might get some more drunk dolls while I'm watching these. No, definitely. I mean, it's so funny because when you called me to do this, I was calling you also to say that we should get together and talk about all this because I wondered what was going on. And, you know, I've been so focused. I understand the side of it that you're talking about and why people are so engaged.

But, you know, I love hearing you talk to people about how to maximize yourself because that, and I'm talking about how to maximize your internal life in a way that allows you to stave off fear long enough to do the work. And I would suggest to you, Dan, that even you are probably afraid of failing at this. Sure. Yeah, no doubt. Absolutely. I mean, yeah.

And that's... No, go ahead. Sorry. No, I mean, and so because writing is uniquely, and especially writing fictional, even though it's based on your life, writing a story, a movie story, some part of ourself really doesn't want to know that maybe we're not great at telling stories, or this time, it's so fundamental to our experience to be entertaining, that the thought of not being entertaining is kind of crushing. But you're such a good storyteller that you've got to just find a way to get a discipline and a routine going that, you know, I think you're a bunch of people you talk to, as I do, do some

kind of morning free writing. Do you? I'm sorry, can you say that one more time? Do you do morning free, do you free write in the morning? I do journaling in the morning, which is not probably the same as free writing uh maybe you could explain exactly how you go about it how do you go about it well i'm really just journaling my plans for the day observing myself as a mindfulness practice but it's not there's no real narrative which i suppose is maybe antithetical to free writing, but it's mostly trying to just examine where I am psychologically and emotionally prior to starting the day and then setting sort of a framework for not completely self-sabotaging for the rest of

the morning and afternoon. Yeah, that's a great, I mean, that's a great practice. To get in, you know. What I do is really based on the morning pages by Julia Cameron in the artist's way. It's three longhand pages where you just keep the pen moving for three pages no matter what, no censoring, no rereading. I just have found that it's the closest thing to magic I've come across, that if you really do it every day in a real disciplined practice, something happens to your subconscious that allows you to get to your most creative place. And I'd say, and I know you've had this experience with other things you've given people.

Let's say I've given that book to 100 people and said, I'm telling you, you need to do this. Of that, of the 100 people I've given it to, maybe 10 of them have actually opened the book and done the exercises. Of those 10, 7 have had books, movies, TV shows made out successful. And it's incredible. It changed my life, even though it's very spiritual and I'm an atheist. But the core ideas in it, the core tools in that book,

they're kind of a companion to The War of Art, because Pressfield talks about resistance, and Cameron has, I think, the cure for it. And so I think they really go together and I think would be useful for you if it turns out this is something that's important to you to do. Yeah, it's one of those things

that won't go away in the way that would seem to indicate before my time on this earth has expired, I have to do it. And I'm going gonna get into it i'll dig in and uh i'm actually fortunate that i have uh some some time opening up in the next few months to really dedicate to to trying to to really tackle it properly so uh but it never gets to you know totally easy no i mean creating every day i just want to say something may sound i may sound glib about this stuff but every day is still for me um all that stuff that you have and that everybody has the insecurity the fear that you're not good enough

that you don't have like i i have to wrestle with every day you know meditation and morning pages and long walks and like you have to you to, you know, every, every day, it's about building a practice that enables you to try to forget that you're afraid. Right. Just like whipping the beast of burden, trying to get it to do what you want. Oh, well, this is, this has been really fun. I, uh, I'm sure we'll end up having a round two at some point. I'm sure my audience will probably ask for it. So I will put a bunch of links in the show notes where people can find more about you and your work,

but what is the best place, if you could send people to one place to learn more about you, where would you suggest they go? I think Twitter, Brian Koppelman, B-R-I-N-K-O-P-P-E-L-M-A-N. Twitter, my blog's not that active, but Twitter kind of leads you to places, and my podcast, which is The Moment with Brian Koppelman, which is a weekly show every Tuesday through the Grantland Network.

All right. Well, this has been great. We'll actually have to meet up for another proper meal and maybe some wine or something like that. Oh, you bring the wine. Let's definitely do that. You bring the wine because I have a whole bunch of things I need to ask you soon. Oh, hey, come on my podcast. Sure. I would love to. Done. Done deal. Great. I'll email this guy, however those people all get. Sure. I would love to. Done. Done deal. Great. I'll email this guy, however those people all get to you. I'm going to email them, and we're going to set up a podcast.

They'll throw the net on me. Thanks so much for the time. I'll talk to you soon, man. Bye, Seth. If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to 4hourblog.com, where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter.

It's twitter.com slash tferris. That's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. Or on Facebook at facebook.com slash timferris. Until next time, thanks for listening.