Robert McKee On The Art of Story & Why Stories Matter

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:18Rich Roll?

  Human beings are driven by stories. But what are stories?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Stories are metaphors for life. Without story, life is unlivable.

• 1:32Rich Roll?

  Well, stories can be the ones we tell ourselves, about ourselves. They can be the ones we tell our friends at parties. But ultimately, stories are far more than just sheer entertainment. Stories and storytelling are actually an integral part of who we are. They are part and parcel of what it means to be human. And as such, understanding story, deconstructing the art of storytelling, and studying its underpinning principles, is an endeavor most worthy of our time and attention. And there's no one better, literally, nobody on the planet, no person more expert, when it comes to the subject of story than Robert McKee.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Stories are equipment for living, to see the full spectrum of life.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Beyond anything we could possibly live, by the thousands.

• 2:28Rich Roll?

  Robert is a modern Aristotle of story and a master of the form who wrote the definitive book on the subject called, of course, Story. For those unfamiliar, Robert is a Fulbright scholar. He is the author of five books on storytelling, including his latest, Action, but is best known as the most sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  The wonderful thing about story is it's a museum. And you can go back, you know, to the greatest of writers. It's all there, waiting for you, and every one of those great works is as valid today as it was when it was written.

• 3:08Rich Roll?

  His students have collectively won 70 Academy Awards, 250 Emmy Awards, and 100 WGA, or Writers Guild of America, awards. And also, his student body includes notable writers, directors, and actors, such as Peter Jackson, William Goldman, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time. Who else? David Bowie, Steven Pressfield, friend of the podcast, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, Geoffrey Rush, and all of the writers at Pixar. In other words, Robert McKee is a living legend, and it was a complete and total honor to host him here in the studio, on the cusp of completing his very last teaching tour.

• 3:52Rich Roll?

  We discussed his friendship with Steven Pressfield, who tagged along, which was really great. We talked about Robert's philosophy of teaching story, what stories are, why they're important for humanity, and so much more, including the absolutely incredible behind-the-scenes story of how Succession's Brian Cox ended up portraying McKee in the Oscar-nominated film Adaptation, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. And it's all coming up, but first...

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  Okay, you guys ready to go? Let's do it. But let's begin by typing "interior podcast studio day" into our screenwriting software, document, hit enter, and enjoy this unforgettable conversation with screenwriting legend, Robert McKee.

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  Robert, it's an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to hold you captive here today. So many questions for you. You're somebody I've revered and followed and respected from afar for a very long time. I've got my copy of "Story" here. As you can tell, it's been through some times here. It's well-worn and faded. I think it was 90, I don't know, what year? Yeah, I think it was 97 when I got this book. I got it when it came out.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  First year.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I dug it out today. I've read it many times. So you've rented space in my head for quite some time. And it's a pinch-me moment to have you here. And we also have Steve Pressfield here as well. I love the fact that you guys are friends. That makes sense to me. It's beautiful to see you guys together. We're here on the precipice of the conclusion of your career, teaching these seminars. You've been doing this for like 50 years?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Forty.

• 5:42Rich Roll?

  Forty years? You got a couple more dates and then that's a wrap?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I started doing these 40 years ago in my early 40s. And it took over my life, put my life in a whole different trajectory. And this fall will be the farewell tour. This is the last time I'll do LA, New York, London. And I'm going to do Budapest. The government's invited me there, as has the Israelis. And so I'll be in Tel Aviv as well. And so that's five... Three days or four days if I do journalists.

• 6:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  The way we do them here in LA and New York and London. And so I'm going out on a high note.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  On a high note, yeah. I mean, how are you feeling about it? Is it bittersweet? Are you excited for it to be in the rearview mirror at the end of this chapter? And what is the next chapter look like?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I really can't say until it's over and I look back and whether there'll be any regret. I don't think so. I know it's gonna be sad. I mean, without question.

• 6:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Half of my life has been consumed with this teaching and developing the seminars and not just on story, but on love stories and crime stories and, and long form television, et cetera. And now what I'm doing is I'm writing story two. And I just, just published, you know, a couple of weeks ago.

• 7:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the action book.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  A book on the action genre.

• 7:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  But the next one, take story, which is still selling. It's amazing, but it hasn't lost a step after 25 years. And, but I've learned a lot in 25 years. And so I'm going to do story two, which will be a different angle on story. And I'm going to look at it emphasizing creative spectrums.

• 7:41Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Every element that a writer wrestles with can be seen on a spectrum of choices. So you can be as minimalist as you want, or as maximalist as you want, and every variation in between. You can tell the whole story over a kitchen table between two characters, or you can do, you know, Game of Thrones.

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Okay? And you can be as realistic as you want, or as unrealistic, non-realistic, fantasied as you wish. And you can stretch reality from the most naturalistic to the most fantastic. And so every element of story can be imagined on a spectrum of choices, from the most to the least, from the biggest to the smallest, to the brightest to the darkest, and on it goes. Because what I want to convey in this, in story two is choices.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  You know, I went out of my way and when I wrote story one, to introduce the book and say, "Look, this is not a book on how to tell a story.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  This is a book on what a story is. And you need to understand all the elements of story, their relationships and how they combine to create a story, and that the possibilities are endless." Well, that's not how people often read the book. They want to be told how to. And so even though I say, "I'm not going to teach you how to," they still want to think, "Okay."

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  So now, story two, because I understand they're desperate. It's monumental, this task of making sense out of life. And to do it in a way that has insight and power and beauty and moves us emotionally and makes us laugh, it's frightening when a young writer thinks, "I'm going to tell a story."

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  Sure. They want you to hold their hand and walk them through the process of the doing, right? And you being a hard-boiled son of a bitch quickly disabuses those people of that idea.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  You know, that only, that only, that only seems to encourage them to, to go, "Yes, he's being tough, but I'm determined, and so tell me how."

• 10:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  So I decided in story two, I'm going to be very clear. There will still be people who will read it as a manual, and there's nothing I can do about that. If they want it to be a manual, then it's going to be a manual for them, okay? But I'm going to be very, very clear in story two, that it's choices. And story two, like the books I've done on character and dialogue, after story one, I decided I'm not going to teach. For screenwriters only.

• 10:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I never wanted to in the first place. In fact, I had a fight with my publisher, Judith Regan, Harper Collins.

• 10:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, iconic.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. Queen of the bestsellers, over the title. And she wanted me to call it Screenwriting.

• 10:56Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And I said, "No, I don't want to call it Screenwriting. I will use films, for the most part, as examples, because that's what people know. And I'll put Screenwriting in the subtitle. But what I want to teach is story, and I'm going to call it Story."

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And so we did that. So Story Two will be for stage, page, and screen.

• 11:17Rich Roll?

  Got it. So Story Two isn't an upending of the principles that are set forth in Story. It is Story being, you know, the what, and Story Two being a little bit of the how, but more an expansion of the principles elaborated in Story.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I hope it's less of the how. You see, when you say to someone, "This is what it is. These are the elements, these are the relationships, they work together to create whatever." If I was teaching music, and I'd say, "This is the 12-note scale. These are chords, right? This is beats, this is rhythm, right? These are the components of music." You would never, for a moment, think that, "Oh, now I can compose music."

• 12:03Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  If somebody explained to me the elements of music.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  If you were teaching, uh, painting, and say, "Here's, this is the rule of thirds, this is perspective, this is the psychology of color. These are the components of anything that goes inside of a rectangle."

• 12:19Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And nobody would think, "Oh, now I can be an artist." But for some reason, you know, when you say, "These are the components of story."

• 12:31Speaker 01

  People think, "Oh, now I can follow that in some kind of prescriptive way, and now I can tell story." And what they discover is, no, they can't. The mastery of these elements in conquering this form takes years, trial and error, success and failure, and mostly failure. And it's really, really difficult, and that, you know, so they don't last.

• 12:55Rich Roll?

  Right. The dilettantes get weeded out.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Right. So, Story Two is gonna make it even clearer than Story One, just how, how much variety of choices you have in every single aspect of it. And I'm also gonna use the clearest, simplest language I can create. I want that when readers read the book, that just lights go on.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  Story is such an interesting terrain to explore, and very tricky and elusive, because story operates as part of the fabric of what it means to be human. Like, everybody is familiar with story. We all are, on some level, some version of a storyteller. We tell stories about ourselves and who we think we are. We tell stories to our friends. It is, in so many ways, a big part of what makes us human. And yet, the deconstruction of what story actually is, and the elements of it, are very difficult to understand. You know, like, and, and there's a huge difference between, you know, the story you tell your friend, and really mastering the form and the art

• 14:08Rich Roll?

  of what it means to tell a great story. So, I wanna disabuse people of the idea that this is gonna be a conversation just for screenwriters or writers. Like, I wanna talk more broadly about how story operates in our lives, and why it's important to kind of understand story, and, you know, how that relates to, you know, the human condition.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Stories are, first of all, metaphors for life. And so, unlike music, which is only dealing with sound, poetry, which is dealing with feelings, painting, which is dealing with what you can see or imagine, abstract or concrete.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Story is bigger than all that. And it's a metaphor for life. And so as complex and difficult as life is to understand, naturally, story which is trying to be expressive of life is needless to say, difficult to accomplish. And I've gotten to a point now where I don't think we have a story problem anymore.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  What do you mean by that?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I see these wonderful TV series. Not so many films. And I read some superb novels now. I mean, the great novels have always been around. But I see great storytelling, especially streaming, long form. And so I think, you know, I think I've had some effect. I think I've helped. I hope I have. But it seems to me that the quality of storytelling, certainly on television, is better than ever.

• 15:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable what's hap- I mean, I don't even, I'm reluctant to even call it television. I don't know what you call it now. Streaming, whatever, long form.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Television has that, it's an old word, and it has all kinds of associations. But it seems to me that the quality of storytelling is as good now or better now than it's ever been. That's not the problem. The problem is content.

• 16:10Rich Roll?

  How do you differentiate content from story? Meaning there's a glut of non-quality content out there that makes it difficult to find the gems?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  I mean, why are we so disappointed when we go to the movies these days?

• 16:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the movies are not so great.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  They're not about anything.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The real storytelling is in the long form, where you can create so much dimension in these characters and allow a story to breathe and be told in the tempo that the story- Wants to be told with that space and it's been remarkable and like, you know, I was thinking about like how this has come to be, obviously, you know, there's, there's technology reasons with streaming and you know, there's been an increasing openness on behalf of networks and studios to, you know, explore this. I mean, the BBC was doing this for a long time before it was happening in America.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  I have writers that I've worked with who write for HBO, for example, and back when HBO was just beginning and developing, becoming what it is, you know, the people at HBO realized that network television had captured the family. And so in order to create an audience for HBO, they had to be anti-family. And so I have friends would go in there and pitch stories at HBO and the note they would get over and over again is, "Not dark enough." Now, if you really want to get a writer excited, give them that note. Not dark enough.

• 17:46Rich Roll?

  Do you really mean that?

• 17:47Speaker 01

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

• 18:28Speaker 01

  want? What does a reader want? What keeps them turning a page? What keeps them coming back, episode after episode? What sustains, you know, some of the long-form series are 100 hours.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Fifty, you know, is normal. Two things. Revelation and change. And so they're fascinated as they, what did we just watch some wonderful series lately? Peaky Blinders.

• 18:59Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's fantastic.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Finally got around to it and it was just great. You watch this to see who these people really are. And so you see their surface and their be outer behaviors. And then episode after episode, you see their dimensions. And a dimension is a contradiction, a consistent contradiction in a character. So in one, in one relationship, he's really kind. In another, he's incredibly cruel. And so he's both. He's capable of being both loving and gentle and vicious and kind, right? Depending, right? Does smart clever things and makes terrible mistakes and does stupid whatever. And so those contradictions create dimensions.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And as you're watching the series, you see that these, in long form, these are not three dimensional characters. These are 10, 12, 15 dimensional characters, literally. And you sit there and study the character and you break down every single dimension within them over 50 hours. And you see that a three dimensional character is a supporting role.

• 20:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

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

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  Sure. It operates like a Russian novel, you know, in the classic sense.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Well, I've looked at certain novels, Russian and otherwise, and I've said, if this was a series, War and Peace, if it were a series, would be season one, and that's all. War and Peace is just six or eight principal characters, family relationships and love relationships, played out against the background of Europe and turmoil. It's War and Peace, for God's sakes, right?

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  But it's only got enough material for one 12-episode season. And so even the most huge, 1,000-page novels would be consumed inside of a long-form series.

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  Right. It appears to me that things started to change. The first real network show that kind of broke the mold of what episodic television could be, to my mind, was Lost, because it was telling a longer story. It took big swings. It didn't always follow through or connect properly on some of those swings, but it was taking risks and it was telling a longer story. And because it was successful, it was signaling to the networks and the studios, oh, that this could work. And then that, you know, is sort of matured in the cable universe with The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and The Wire, David Chase and Vince Gilligan, who are telling these

• 22:22Rich Roll?

  long stories, who understood on some level like that there was this broader arc and that these characters were going to land in a very different place from where they began. But with that also came the advent of the anti-hero as the protagonist, right? Which is different from Lost and has become a staple of, you know, serious, dramatic, long-form storytelling. So, you know, why do you think, like, why have we embraced the anti-hero? Why has, you know, the bad guy? I don't mean that in a perfunctory way. I realize there's multi-dimensions to all of these characters, but in a sense, you know, it is a different type of character that all of us as audience members have really

• 23:07Rich Roll?

  gravitated towards and connected with, which feels different than prior decades.

• 23:13Speaker 01

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

• 23:58Speaker 01

  So like in The Sopranos, if you surround Tony with mobsters, the FBI who's lying and cheating and whatnot, if you surround him with a darker, darker world and you see that he's troubled, that he has panic attacks and he's terrified of something he doesn't understand, the audience goes, ah, panic attack, just like me. These things, I have these moments, I have that. He's, he's vulnerable. He's a gangster, but he's vulnerable, just like me. And so he becomes the center of good. Right?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Because it's, because your empathy has to go somewhere.

• 24:46Rich Roll?

  Right. And generally, these anti-heroes are living by a certain code. And that might not be the code that we would choose for our own lives, but they have rules.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Codes are code.

• 24:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you know, often it's, you know, family first or whatever it is.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:00Rich Roll?

  And it's very important that they not violate that code. And within the strictures of that code, there is a certain goodness that you can identify or a humanity.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and somebody who has some code, as you say. There's something that, that they would risk their life for. There's some standard that they would hold, even if it's, you know, long before Tony Soprano, there was The Godfather. And we're used to empathizing with gangsters in that sense. I mean, Hollywood's done that for, for decades. And so you paint a darker world, you turn on a light in the middle of it, and there's some positive quality, like I have a private code. And we go, yeah, just like me, I too have a code. And so they, they empathize with some, some.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Some really difficult, complex, troubling characters. I think that's a huge part of it, is that the writing is so good. They know how to sculpt the positive and negative charges in a cast and create this glow at the middle. That's one thing. But I also think, since the 70s, is society in general slowly waking up to what a corrupt world we live in. And I remember the first big surprise for me for that was Chinatown. So I think that the writers who are creating these great series like The Wire and Six

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Feet Under, you know, is a great series, Boardwalk Empire, right? Were actually 10 years behind society. People always ask, you know, do writers lead society? Do they create things that people then emulate, whatever? Or do society, does it happen first in society and then writers are attuned to that? And that's my point of view. It happens first in society. Because the forces of society are so titanic that culture and the economics and the politics of things are too huge to be led anywhere. And so writers, I think, are people who are very sensitive to what's happening in the world.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And so when they start showing the dark side, people responded positively to it because they already knew it was there. And they go, yes, that's life. That's who we are now. That's our, you know, whatever. And that, even to this day, or that audience that is willing to admit what a corrupt world it really is, is limited.

• 27:48Rich Roll?

  So here we are now in an era in which, you know, basically, the anti-hero reigns supreme. And culturally, and I was talking to Steve the other day, chatting with him about like what we might talk about. And one of the things that he brought up that I was, that I think is super interesting, and it's, you know, a big part in the new book, Action, is, you know, is about the ascension of the quote-unquote, for better or worse, like the bad guy. And we're in this kind of bad guy era. In many ways, you know, Trump is sort of a classic villain. And the narratives that we see being spun in popular culture and in politics are, you know, about what Trump is doing.

• 28:32Rich Roll?

  And we have Putin and all of these kind of, you know, they're like Titanic bad guys, right? And in some ways, like, how is that reflected in the writing?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Thirty percent of the American public thinks that Trump descended from heaven and he's here to lead us.

• 28:51Rich Roll?

  So what is going on?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  The other seventy percent are not so. But there's thirty percent of Americans who really believe that he is the hero, not an anti-hero.

• 29:01Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And so, but yeah, the majority of people, to some degree, see it for what it is. When Trump was elected, I know Michael Moore was saying before the election, he's going to get elected.

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  He was calling it very early.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Right. And he's, we're both from Michigan and so is Michael Moore.

• 29:23Rich Roll?

  Yep.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And, uh, and I've always known this since I was a kid, growing up in the suburbs of Detroit.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  I'm sure it was the same everywhere in America, but as kids, we thought that abusive alcoholic fathers was normal. But nobody ever said that. Everybody worshipped the family, right? But in the subtext, we all knew that the worst time of your life is your childhood. But we denied it and denied it and denied it. The society, the Americas, the wonderful country that, you know, we just couldn't face it. But now, it's out there to be seen and it's so clear. And so I think storytelling has responded to society's sense

• 30:22Speaker 01

  that we are not who we pretend to be. And I don't know why we ever thought we were. I mean, you know, living here in LA back when, I used to play golf with some engineers who were working to take this military system of communication into the world that became the Internet, right? And they were all excited about what they're doing. And they would talk about it constantly and over lunch and whatnot, right? And it was fascinating. At one point, they asked me, you know, what do you think? What do you think of this? I said, it's fascinating.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  And if what you guys are proposing actually comes true, it will be a perfect mirror of human nature. And they all smiled because these engineers had no idea what human nature is. And the Internet and social media are a perfect mirror. The pornography, the cruelty, the meanness of all kinds, crime of all kinds, and they're able to do it anonymously. And so the Internet has exposed human nature for what it really is.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And they can get away with it for the most part because it's anonymous. And you see how what, you know, what? Here we are. Sorry, creatures. We really are. And, you know, and my feeling is that that's gotta be a good thing.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Because the truth is coming out, little by little, but the truth is coming out. And people are going to have to live in a reality that they would, that they denied throughout history, for the most part.

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  Right, so you're saying, basically, that gives us a chance, the opportunity, to actually reckon with it and perhaps, you know, transcend it, hopefully. It's a macro version of being in denial of the alcoholic father, right?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. You just have to stop pretending.

• 32:33Rich Roll?

  Right. This is who we are.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And, living in reality is, Freud, Freud once said, he said, "It's impossible to live in reality." He said, "Just try it. Try for one minute to live in absolute brutal, rock bottom reality for one full minute." And he said, "Within 20 seconds, you'll start to fantasize." He said, "It's just too awful, the mind can't bear it." Right? And this is why we write stories.

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  Well, what is reality? How do you define reality? We're all, you know, operating through the lens of our perception. And our perception, you know, creates the, the epistemics, the heuristics, how we make sense of the world, right? And story really is the core functioning, operating system for all of that. Like, story is uniquely human, it's what makes us who we are, and, you know, gives us this framework, right? So, let's go back to just defining what story is. And, you know, it's just, it's curious to me that, you know, story and humanity cannot be, you know, they're inextricably linked with each other.

• 33:54Rich Roll?

  We're the, we're the one creature on earth that is really operating on story all the time. And stories are functioning in very visible ways, but also in so many invisible ways. And, and all of that really dictates the decisions that we make and, and, you know, how we kind of function in the world.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  When you take an action in life at any moment, you always take an action designed to create a positive reaction that will help you get toward what you want.

• 34:29Speaker 01

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

• 35:12Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Okay? So you insult people because it's satisfying to watch them suffer for a moment, right? Or you compliment them because you want them to, whatever. All right? How do you know what to do in order to cause a reaction that will get you a step toward what you want? If you only had your living experience, you wouldn't know what to do. You'd be paralyzed. You wouldn't know what to do. And so how do you know what actions to take in life to get what you want? Because you have been told stories since you were a child? You have read stories as a child? You have seen them countless, on a, by the tens of thousands of stories from, everything from, from TV commercials

• 35:58Speaker 01

  to, you know, crime and punishment. That whole stockpile of story is buried in your memory and gives you a sense of, if I do this in these circumstances, that person will take an action that will help me, whatever. Because life without story, life is, um, uh, terrifying, unlivable.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  There's also something-

• 36:24Speaker 01

  You wouldn't know what to do.

• 36:25Rich Roll?

  Right. It's, it's giving you this framework. But I think there's also something unique about story in that it tends to, like a story well told-

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  Will live rent free in your conscious or unconscious mind in perpetuity. Right. Like, what is it about a great story well told that can, that can just impact us so profoundly as opposed to the imparting of the information? Like, you can say to somebody, and this is kind of like, you know, what I do here on the podcast. Like, some people, they're an expert in something and they'll come in and they'll say, here are the five things you should be doing every day, or something like that. And you could take that information and some people might even act on that. But that's very different from somebody who comes in and tells an incredible story in which those tenets or principles are conveyed

• 37:18Rich Roll?

  that will live with that person and have a much more profound effect and also more likely to actually get them to change their behavior than a listicle or some bullet points or a PowerPoint or what have you. So, you know, from that, you know, I'm always trying to like, you know, default to storytelling over just the information. And I can't help but like, wonder like, like, how did we evolve to learn in that way? Such that-

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, neuroscientists have been looking at this for at least 40 or 50 years now. And what they've come to understand is that the mind is a story making machine. The mind takes its experience at every moment and is narratizing everything that happens to it. And so its understanding of reality is based upon the stories that it has told itself. It's why we human beings are able, you know, to rule the world as we, as we do, is because we can take raw experience and first of all, look into the subtext.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  And ask the question, why? Why did that just happen? And your mind penetrates that and says, it recognizes, there must have been a force in there, there must have been a need, she wanted this, he wanted that, this business wants that, the government wants that, there's these desires going inside, and they're motivating these behaviors, and these forces are hidden underneath, and then they manifest themselves in a behavior, but if you track back to it, you discover the reasons why. No other, no animal ever asks why, only human beings ask why.

• 39:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:17Speaker 01

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

• 40:01Speaker 01

  story educates you on the hows and whys of things.

• 40:06Rich Roll?

  Perhaps most profound of the stories that impact our lives, for better or worse, are the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. We're all walking around with some version of a locked-in narrative, right? That either liberates us or imprisons us, probably imprisons us, you know, and probably is working in disservice, but how do you think about that?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Also known as self-deception.

• 40:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, none of these stories are true, whether they're good or bad, they're all illusions, but...

• 40:36Speaker 01

  True in the sense they're not factual.

• 40:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  They may have a real truth in them, however, about why we did what we did, but yes, trying to make sense out of our own life, and we go back with regret often, why did I do that? Why didn't that work? Why did I fail at that? Or was I just lucky? I mean, we're trying to make sense out of our own life. And so we tell ourselves stories out of our memories. And the stories that we tell ourselves are very selective.

• 41:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And deceptive.

• 41:09Rich Roll?

  So what's the story that you tell yourself about yourself?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  You know, some years ago, I was lecturing in Spain. And a journalist there asked me a question nobody had ever asked me. Which was, because I'd probably by this time I'd been lecturing for at least, you know, 25 years. And he asked me, why? He said, why do you do this? Why do you travel, you know? He says, you must have made enough money by now. Why? Why do you keep traveling the world trying to help people compose insightful, honest stories for page, stage, and screen? Why? Why do you do this? And I had to think, because I had never, until he asked me that question, I had never

• 41:56Speaker 01

  really thought to ask myself that. And I said, well, very little in life, very little, is meaningful. It's random, far more random than we want to believe.

• 42:13Rich Roll?

  But meaning is a function of, of choice. You can attribute meaning to anything that happens to you.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Meaning is something that we give to something else.

• 42:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's, as what I was saying was, there is no intrinsic meaning to life. It is a biological accident that occurred on this planet, maybe others, but there is no intrinsic meaning. But that doesn't mean, it's not the same thing as saying life is meaningless. There is no intrinsic meaning. But you, as the existentialists used to teach, you have to find your project. You have to find out what gets you up in the morning? What's your purpose in life? You have to give your life meaning. And you have to do it yourself. If you wait for other people to do it, you will live an invalid life.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It won't be your life, you'll be leading other people's lives. And so I thought, you know, I said, there's no intrinsic meaning. And so what is my meaning? Why do I do this? And the answer that I gave him was this. There is no intrinsic meaning in reality, in life. There is, however, suffering. That's real. Human beings suffer. All living things suffer. That's what it is to be alive, is to suffer. Anything that a person can do to alleviate the suffering in others

• 43:50Speaker 01

  is a good thing, a positive thing, a meaningful thing. Stories do exactly that. They make life livable. They help alleviate the suffering because great, great suffering comes from confusion, from just not understanding things. I don't know why, I don't know why. Why is this happening to me? Who am I, etc. Those are terrifying things and, and you suffer in that confusion.

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  Right, so it's providing this map of meaning that is giving you an explanation or a better understanding for your own personal struggle, but also making it a shared experience. Like if you're relating to somebody else who's gone through something analogous, you don't feel quite alone, or that your experience is unique from your fellow man.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a question of, um, stories don't tell us what we should do. There's a difference between ought and is. We ought to do things. When we have ideals, we understand, you know, we have certain standards that we want to achieve. We have ideals and we ought to live up to our moral ideals, our artistic ideals, right? We ought to. But then there's is. There's what is. And stories, great stories, make what is clear.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  They don't tell you what you ought to do. You know, Lord of the Flies is a magnificent novel about human nature, but it doesn't tell you what you ought to do. It just says, "This is human nature. This is what is."

• 45:28Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 45:29Speaker 01

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

• 45:46Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, extrapolating on that idea of, of, you know, suffering as, as being fundamental and, you know, a primary aspect of, of the human condition. I've heard you speak many times about, you know, the idea of life being a struggle, right? You bristle at this notion that described life as a journey.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I hate that word.

• 46:10Rich Roll?

  And I want to kind of understand this a little bit better and perhaps, you know, you can indulge me in pushing back a little bit.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Life is not a journey.

• 46:20Rich Roll?

  So let's, let's deconstruct that a little bit.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Journey is a California word. And there, you know, there are many. Share, you know, you just can't tell anybody anything in California. You must share it with them.

• 46:36Rich Roll?

  Well, here we are in California.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Sharing.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  Yes, and we're gonna, we're gonna share some ideas on this. I mean, the way I look at it is, you know, journey, the word journey itself is a very broad word. It's, it's also somewhat neutral, whereas

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not.

• 46:51Rich Roll?

  Struggle.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  It should be, it should be. You're right, it should be.

• 46:55Rich Roll?

  Journey is, it can be negative or positive, right? It doesn't exist on an extreme of the polarities.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  If you want to define it that way, but that's not how people use it.

• 47:07Rich Roll?

  They, they use it as something aspirational.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Euphemism. Euphemisms are words to protect us from reality. We don't call it shit. We call it number two. Okay?

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  I got you. I follow.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  We use euphemisms because we can't face reality. It's too ugly. It's too awful. It's what it is. And it's painful and, and so we, we wanna, we wanna live in a, you know, like I said, denial, as psychologists have pointed out since forever, denial makes the world go round. And journey is a word that makes it possible to deny the truth. If you say life is a journey, a journey is you get on a bus in Cleveland and it takes you to Chicago and you sit there watching the countryside go by. That's a journey.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Life is not like that. It's a struggle and uphill. It's Sisyphus in that rock.

• 48:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's also all the beautiful colors of the rainbow. Like, here's my point. And like, hear me out. Just let me, let me just, let me just finish this thought. So I do think journey is a broader term. That, you know, struggle is very connotative and, and, and somewhat reductive in a negative sense. Like, struggle, of course, is part of the journey. It's an essential part of it. But doesn't the word journey also make room for the spectrum of, of experiences from joy to love and celebration and heartbreak and setbacks and conflict? It's all of it, right?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  It could be, but that's not how people use the word.

• 48:49Rich Roll?

  Okay, I'm using it that way.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  They use it to avoid.

• 48:53Rich Roll?

  I, I get your point. I understand what you're saying.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  That it's a bitch. It's not easy. It's hard. People are terrible much of the time. You have to deal with people, you know? I mean, one of, one of the best things that come out of the pandemic is people are now working at home and they're so pleased to be working at home. Why? Because they don't have to be around other people.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  It's as simple as that, right? And so, yeah, I know, I know. But, look, I teach writers. It's very important, from my point of view, that writers use a truthful, precise language. That they do not indulge in euphemisms. Because if they use euphemisms in their own mind, how can they possibly interpret reality in an honest, truthful way? And celebrate it when it needs celebration, lament it when it doesn't, right? But if writers use words to separate themselves from reality, how in the world could they

• 50:03Speaker 01

  ever write anything that would bring the audience or the reader into contact with reality? And so that's why I get, you know, I get, you know, peevish, I know, it's boring.

• 50:15Rich Roll?

  No, it's not boring, I love it.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  There's a, it's not idle, I mean, there's a rea- I don't like the word "hope" much. Hope is the denial of reality. If you really think about the possibility of me achieving what I want to achieve, what are the odds? I mean, there's a possible, you could get what you want, but the chances are you won't.

• 50:45Rich Roll?

  But it's also the engine of tackling and overcoming obstacles, right? You can't face dire or tragic circumstances without some, you can't get into action without some sliver of hope that you'll be able to navigate it and get to the other side.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  There's a difference between expectation and hope, I mean, or anticipation and hope. Because if people use the word "hope" in the same way that they use the word "anticipation" or "expectation", I'd be fine.

• 51:18Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Right?

• 51:19Rich Roll?

  So.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  When people, when people are going through hell and then somebody says, well, there's always hope.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Right. No, I understand that, you know, that's, that's greeting card bullshit.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 51:30Rich Roll?

  I understand what you're saying. I mean, fundamentally, what you're getting at is honesty, right? Like, how can we strip away artifice and really, you know, pull the covers on reality and, you know, use writing and story as a means of elucidating the human condition in its truth, right? And that's the core of great writing, whatever story it is you're trying to tell.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  See, if a writer is going to fault one way or another, I would rather that they fault toward cynicism, certainly skepticism, than fault toward optimism, hope, and everything's going to turn out all right, happy endings.

• 52:10Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, it's not that you can't have a positive ending if the characters earn it.

• 52:15Rich Roll?

  They have to earn it. Yeah, that's the difference.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Right? But happy endings

• 52:25Speaker 01

  is, is, is a commercial imperative.

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it just, you know, any audience member knows whether they're conscious of it or not, the difference between a happy ending earned and one that's saccharine and, you know, kind of slapped on top of it.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:41Rich Roll?

  And you leave, like, maybe you even feel good.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Did you, did you watch the series Leftovers?

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Oh, I, I made a list because I wanted to talk about my favorite long form.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:51Rich Roll?

  Shows and that's up at the top. Like, I just think.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And that ending.

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  It's one of the greatest.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Is one of the most powerful, beautiful endings of anything I've ever experienced in my life. And those characters have earned that love in that moment. And so it's a positive ending, but it isn't a happy ending in the Hollywood sense of the word. It is a positive ending. They've reached something worthy in their lives, something of real quality in their lives, but they've been through hell to get there. And it's, it's an honest ending. Positive and honest.

• 53:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And so I'm not against happy endings. I'm just against the sentiment telling.

• 53:35Rich Roll?

  Who, who out there is, is really killing it? Like who in your mind is really doing the great work right now? What have you enjoyed or consumed recently that you think really rises above?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I mentioned Peaky Blinders. I just finished that. I thought that was wonderful. But that's from like five years ago, right?

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  Well, I think the recent, the most recent season was recently, this past year.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. I, you know, when, when people ask that question, I, I tell you a series that has stuck with me for the last year or two or whatever. And it's called Made.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  I don't think I've seen that.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  M A I D. Made.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  And I just loved it. And it did okay. It got some nominations and so forth. It's about a single mom and her, her, I don't know if they were actually married. I don't think they were, but they were, you know, living together. Is an alcoholic and abusive and she takes her kid and she's never had a job. She has almost no education and she's thrown into the world. And she gets a job cleaning houses and over the course of the series grows as a human being.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Just figures out how things work, how she works, what's her, what her real values are. She's got a crazy mother and all the rest of it. And to, and finally she gets herself to college. Positive, happy ending, but she really earned it. And why does that series, you know, pop to mind when you ask that question? I can only say that it's, I think it's wonderfully done as usual, beautifully acted. But that's everything now. I mean, the, the actors as a community of artists are 10 years ahead of the writers. Every time you turn on TBC, you see these wonderful performances and you say, where'd they, where'd they come?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  But I think the reason it, it got me is that that's a world I don't know. Single mom, cleaning houses. The writing was so terrific, honest writing. There's some scenes in there that deal with hoarders. I've known one hoarder in my life, a mother-in-law I had some time ago. And they decide then, some hoarder decides to clean up their house, but they can't do it themselves. I mean, they're not emotionally able, right? So they get a cleaning company. Or a house is gonna be put up for sale. And so the realtor brings in a cleaning company to make that house sparkle for the buyers.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  And the cleaners see what the previous owners, how they lived.

• 56:28Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  And how they left it. I mean, there was insights there into lower middle class, middle class, lower class, from an angle through the eyes of people who have to clean up the mess that people leave. And at the same time, she's growing as a character and evolving, based on a true story, based on a factual story. I'd never seen anything, I've never experienced anything like that. And so I thought it was terrific. And, you know, nobody knows it.

• 57:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. I thought I'd seen all the great long forms out there.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that long. I mean, it's one season, you know, it's like eight episodes.

• 57:13Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  I, I always hesitate over that, that question because you get judged by your answer.

• 57:20Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  So if I, if I like, you know, The Norseman.

• 57:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, Mayhem, right? Uh, uh, people say, yeah, you know, that's these.

• 57:35Rich Roll?

  Right. You're gonna get, you're gonna get pigeonholed. I, I get it. I mean, I think there's.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  So I like The Maid, too, you know? But I also like The Norseman. So, uh, so, uh, it's, the choices are wonderful today.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I mean, the good fight is coming back. And my judgment, the greatest TV series of all is Better Call Saul.

• 57:58Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Breaking Bad.

• 57:59Rich Roll?

  All time.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  All time.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  More than Sopranos, more than Breaking Bad, Mad Men, all of that.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  Of all time. Okay, no. Now, I say Better Call Saul is the greatest TV series I've ever written, okay? And then somebody turns on episode one, on my recommendation, and they find this crazy Jimmy McGill and his mean spirited brother and all the rest of it, and it just bores them to death, right? And they're going to say, well, who is this expert, McKee? What the hell does he know? So, I just say, look, explore, you know, get Netflix and HBO and Prime and, you know, the usual Hulu and all the usual suspects, and go looking.

• 58:43Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And something captures you, if it really works for you, you're going to have a quality of experience, a depth and breadth of experience in long-form television that no human beings ever had prior to the 21st century.

• 59:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  This is, this is, what we're creating now is breathtaking, and it surpasses in its density and its, and its complexity, powers, much of everything that we've ever, I mean, there's still Shakespeare and there's...

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  Sure. Sure. I mean, it's, yeah, it's where all the talent and the great work is happening right now, for sure.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  But now, we are very fortunate to live in a world where the, the quality of, and insights into character, insights into society, what's right and wrong with our society, are really astute, and I can't keep up with it.

• 59:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's too much.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  It's too much.

• 59:41Rich Roll?

  All the foreign language stuff, too. There's amazing foreign language.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yes, if you start looking, if you, if you, you know, if you're willing to read subtitles and you see all the stuff that's coming out of Denmark and Sweden and...

• 59:52Rich Roll?

  Oregon, Le Bureau from France was unbelievable.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:03Rich Roll?

  But anyway, let's shift gears here a little bit. I mean, when you, you know, with all of the amazing writers that you've mentored and worked with over the years, I mean, to your mind, what distinguishes good from the greats? Like, when you think of William Goldman, who was a student of yours and is a friend of yours, like, what makes him that much better than someone, you know, just 10% less successful? Like, what is the edge that makes the great people great?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  It's talent.

• 1:00:35Rich Roll?

  And what is that, how does that talent translate?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  It has nothing to do with me. I cannot, I, you know, I teach what I teach. People take it and use it as they will. And the fact that certain students of mine are really the highest water is a question of talent. You know, you can define talent, it's really simple. Talent, creative talent, is the discovery of the third thing. A talented person over on the right side of their brain, they have a faculty, a creative IQ, your conventional IQs over on your left side,

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  this is simplistic, but the creative IQ is certain people have the power to discover the hidden connection between two things that already exist, but a third thing that connects them in a way no one else has ever thought before.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  So what would be an example of that?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Analogical logic. Example I often give in class is that little poem that you read in junior high school, I think it is, it's called "The Fog," Carl Sandburg's "The Fog." And there's a phrase in there, it says, "The fog," I think it's moved, I forget, "but the fog moved in on little cats' feet."

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Fog is weather. Cat's feet is an animal. There is no necessary relationship between them. But Sandberg found a relationship between fog and cat's feet. And when he puts it together in that simile, like cat's feet, a third thing is born into the world, which is the relationship between fog and cat's feet. That's creativity. It's analogical logic. It's the discovery of the hidden connection. It's delusional to think that you create from nothing. You cannot make something out of nothing.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  What artists do is they take what is and they find connections between all of what is and they fuse them into third things that are wonderful or beautiful and enriched somehow when they do it really well.

• 1:03:04Rich Roll?

  Right. And with the kind of hidden piece there also is that it has to be true, right? Like that idea of the fog and the cat's feet, when you contemplate that, it not only elevates like the visceral experience of that, you know it innately like, oh yeah, that is what it is.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that's, you know, when someone's writing and they're reaching for a metaphor or a metaphor comes to mind and they try it out and they go, no, that's not right. So they look for another one, another one, you know, different, right? And out of 10, they might find one that is really fresh and true. And that's the one they use. And so it's not as if these, these tropes of language just fall out of the brain. Most of what falls out of the brain is worthless. And you have to have taste and judgment is to know what's.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  So how do you think about, how do you think about the idea of the muse though? Like the unseen, you know, inspiration and the mystical art of, you know, drawing down upon imagination?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Steve Pressfield.

• 1:04:13Rich Roll?

  I might find the tension in your perspectives here.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  He wrote that wonderful book, The War of Art, and I wrote the preface to it. And.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  His publisher asked me to write the preface to it. And, um, and I said, I think it's a wonderful book. It's a beautiful book. But I, I can't buy the muse. And his publisher said, good, because neither do I. I said, but there is talent.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  And it is subconscious. And so it seems as if it's coming from outside of you. Descending from above, whatever metaphor you want to use, right? But of course, it's coming from you. It's you. You're doing this, nobody else. And if it's a mystery to you, it's because it's subconscious and.

• 1:05:07Rich Roll?

  But you know as well as anyone that, that many a great artist will say, I didn't create this thing. It kind of came through me. Like there's this idea of being, you know.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, you have to understand.

• 1:05:18Rich Roll?

  Receiving kind of mode.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  You have to understand. The marketing of artists.

• 1:05:24Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:05:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  They want to appear mysterious. We all know, anybody who's worked knows that if you keep 10% of what you write, it's remarkable.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  More likely something like five or two or whatever. It's a tiny, tiny percentage of what comes through you that you actually keep.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  And so they know that, you know, what is it to write? What is it actually like?

• 1:05:54Rich Roll?

  It's torturous and terrible.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  You sit down, a piece of paper, okay? Or a screen on your computer. And, um, he says, she says, and you knock out a scene.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Takes maybe 10 minutes. Then what do you do? You read what you've written.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And as you read it, you critique it. Oh shit, that's terrible. He wouldn't say that. And then you go back and you rewrite it. And then what do you do? You read it again. What works, what doesn't, and most of it still doesn't work. Maybe one or two things you keep. And then you go back and you rewrite. And if you, if you had a stopwatch at your keypad, the way lawyers do, and kept track of how much time do I spend actually writing a scene? And how much time do I spend critiquing it? And playing with it? And then rewriting it?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  The time you spend critiquing and analyzing is 10 times the time you spent writing it. Probably more than that. And probably much more than that. I mean, you know, we've all, you know, written one paragraph a day, right? And, and to come to sit down the next morning and go, a piece of shit. And out that whole paragraph that you spent a whole day on, it's gone. But if, if you tell people that, if the writer said, you have no idea how hard it is, man. I spent maybe, you know, 20 minutes a day creating something that, that I didn't spend the next 10 hours savaging. And I often just throw the whole thing out and start all over again.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  It's really hard work. It's gutty. You know, it drives you crazy. Your guts are in a knot all day long, and that's why we drink, right? Right. If you actually said that to people, okay? Nobody wants to hear that. What they want to believe is that they were walking down the street and it just descended out of the ether and into me and through me. And it, you know.

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  I get that. I mean, there's a workmanlike woodshedding of, you know, that dispels the romance and the, you know, mysticism of the whole thing. And the vast majority of writing is painful and hard and, you know.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  And boring.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and boring, right?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Not again.

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  And lonely and all of that.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  All of the rest of it.

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  But there are those moments of inspiration or temporary flow states where there's a sense of ease about it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. And you celebrate those and you go, you know, at the end of the day, if you've got a decent pass at whatever page that you're working on, and you read it, you go, that's not bad. You know, that's a good day.

• 1:08:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  I lecture, I teach and I write for writers. And if anybody has to be honest about it, I do.

• 1:08:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  I can't invite people into this world. Somebody decides I'm gonna be, you know, get out of college, I'm gonna be a writer. They have to be willing to fail for the next 10 years. That's 10 major works, 10 novels, 10 films, 10 plays, 10 of whatever. At least one a year, at least one a year, for the next 10 years and nobody wants them. That's real. And I cannot pretend to my students that you're gonna have success by just following this, do that, one thing or another, and it'll, you know, it'll flow and it'll just

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  come down to you and you're whatever.

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  Right. No, I get it. And I think, you know, that's a big piece in the success of the seminars is the fact that you tell it like it is. Like, this is the truth of the matter. This is a very difficult road.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  I'm actually restrained.

• 1:09:59Rich Roll?

  Are you? Well, that's a good segue into...

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Well, I'm actually restrained. If I wanted to...

• 1:10:05Rich Roll?

  Listen, you... I'm finding you to be very gentlemanly here and reserved. And, you know, that conjures the scene in Adaptation, which, you know, upon seeing that, made me intimidated to meet you here today. Because that, you know, iconic scene sort of precedes you. Can we talk about Adaptation?

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, of course.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  I mean, first of all, one of my all-time favorite movies. And that sequence and your persona being rendered by Brian Cox so brilliantly in that movie just, you know, lives with me. It's incredible, right? And I know there's a great backstory here. Can you tell that story?

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Uh, why Brian Cox? Is that the?

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  Well, just, you know, how did this whole thing come together?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  The whole phenomenon?

• 1:10:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:10:50Rich Roll?

  I know you've told it a million times.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, um, phone rang one day. And it was a producer calling from New York, Ed Saxon. And he said, "We, uh, we have a problem." And I thought they wanted me to script actor, right? "We have a problem." I said, "What's the problem?" He said, "Well, we've got this writer, Charlie Kaufman, and he's written a screenplay and made you a character in it. He has freely stolen from your lectures and your book without, obviously, permission. And we don't know what to do."

• 1:11:28Rich Roll?

  Well, you knew what to do. You knew he had to call you and get you on board.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  I said, I said, "Send me the script." So I read it and, um...

• 1:11:42Rich Roll?

  Was that the first? Had you, did you know Charlie Kaufman before that?

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:11:47Rich Roll?

  So you didn't know what his particular flavor of, right?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  And, um, and I could see that what he wanted me to be is the villain.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  He wanted me to represent Hollywood.

• 1:12:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  And he perceives Hollywood as the villain. And Hollywood is formulaic. And, uh, and he perceived me as formulaic.

• 1:12:13Rich Roll?

  An insult to his creative genius.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. But I also realized he needs a villain because otherwise the screenplay sucks.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Uh, it's just a, you know, it's just a, uh, masturbation about how awful it is to be a writer, the stuff we were just talking about. And, uh, and very importantly, the third act sucked. It was awful. So I called Ed Saxon back and, um, I said, I see what he's up to. And I can, you know, I see your concern because, um, if you go ahead with this project, I will sue you for everything you've got.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  And he said, well, what do we, you know? I said, well, here's what we're gonna do. One, you're gonna write a redeeming scene for my, for my character. Two, I have to have, say, in the casting. And three, there has to be a whole new third act because the third act sucks. And I can't be a character in a bad movie.

• 1:13:29Rich Roll?

  How did it originally end? What was the difference?

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Oh, um, Susan Orlean's, um, shoots a cop.

• 1:13:37Rich Roll?

  So it didn't have any of the meta nature of how, you know, the, yeah, okay.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:14:07Rich Roll?

  I respect that, though, and I would argue that he succeeded.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:14:10Rich Roll?

  He succeeded in that.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  I get it.

• 1:14:12Rich Roll?

  I mean, some of the, not all of them, you know, I mean, Schenectady, like, there's some, right.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  But he pretends he only wants to be an artist.

• 1:14:20Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  In fact, he knows how Hollywood works. He knows if he doesn't make money, he won't, he won't be working. And so it's a bit hypocritical, it's a bit, you know.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Pretentious. But that's okay. I said, okay. I said, but, you know, I said, so we're gonna have to have meetings.

• 1:14:38Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So art imitates life imitates art.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  Like what you're doing in the movie, you're now doing for the movie.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, before I decided to go for it, go with it, on my conditions, I, I talked to two people. I called William Goldman.

• 1:14:57Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  And I said, Bill, they, they want to make me a character in a movie and, uh.

• 1:15:03Rich Roll?

  And for people, let me just interject for a moment, apologies, but for people that don't know, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, wrote Butch Cassidy, All the President's Men, Marathon Man.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Rich Roll?

  Go ahead.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Certainly the greatest writer of dialogue.

• 1:15:18Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  In the history of the movies. And he said, don't do it. I said, well, they're gonna give me permission on the casting. He said, oh, really? Eh, eh, eh? Okay, who do you want? I said, uh, Gene Hackman.

• 1:15:33Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  He said, okay, it'll be Gene Hackman with a big pink bow around his neck. He said, Bob, they're out to get you.

• 1:15:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no matter how you slice it, you're gonna end up looking bad.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  They're gonna get you. If you let them, they're gonna get you. Don't do it.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  So then, I called my son.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  And I said, Paul, and he said, do it. But William Goldman says, you know, he's a dad. You're gonna be a character in a Hollywood film. In fact, I'd already been a character in one film called Twenty Dates. He's gonna be another character now, but in a major Hollywood film. He said, no matter what, you know, you know, do it. You'll love it, do it. And so then I called Saxon back and I said, you know, I have to have casting, whatever. And we have to have writers' meetings with me and them. And we gotta find a third act that, and the third act that they came up with, I said, okay.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  But I knew only half the audience would go with it.

• 1:16:42Rich Roll?

  When it pivots towards his brother's version of what a good story is lifted from what he learned in your seminar, basically.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And then.

• 1:16:51Rich Roll?

  I thought it was fantastic.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but.

• 1:16:54Rich Roll?

  I think it's one of the great third acts.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Well, but.

• 1:16:58Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's certainly unique and unlike anything you're ever gonna see.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  I'll tell you where the dividing line comes. In that moment that Meryl Streep's character, Susan Orlean, says, we're going to have to kill him.

• 1:17:11Rich Roll?

  Right, that's the Rubicon where it all changes.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Half the audience went on and they just didn't believe anything after that.

• 1:17:19Rich Roll?

  But they're missing it.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I agree, I agree with you.

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  It just becomes so absurd.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and what, you know what?

• 1:17:31Rich Roll?

  But what was that like, working with Spike and Charlie?

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  They were great, they were great. They're, they're very, they were great. And they, they didn't argue. Because I.

• 1:17:43Rich Roll?

  But that was, it was their idea to make that pivot and you just helped them craft that so that it would operate?

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  They, they wanted the, they, they wanted the ending they first sent me. And I said, no, that's out. But I sat down and I explained to them why.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  And they're reasonable people and they sat there and oh yeah, I suppose, yeah, yeah. And they said, or you could do it without me. And if you, you know, if you.

• 1:18:15Rich Roll?

  That becomes a page one rewrite.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  If you put me in the, if I do not approve the last act and you put me in that, then you will be faced with a lawsuit, that I will win. So they tried to do it without my character.

• 1:18:28Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  They sent me that draft without my character in it and it really sucked. So then they came back and they said, yeah, well, you know, you, we have to have you in this, in the movie. And I said, well, then my conditions stand. They need to find a third act that works. And so I sat down with them and I gave notes and they, they didn't argue, they were very not polite and listening. And I didn't tell them what to write. I said, this is why this doesn't work and this doesn't work, that doesn't work, whatever. And I see what you're trying to do, but you haven't gotten there yet.

• 1:19:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  And so anyway, it all, at the end of the day, it all, you know.

• 1:19:09Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and Brian Cox was your casting choice?

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, what happened was, um, I said, um, I can't tell you who you must cast because who knows whether that actor is available. I said, um, but I want you to give me a list. And, um, what I needed to know was their casting philosophy. For all I knew, they saw for the McKee character, this could be the Dan Aykroyd, Danny DeVito school of casting, right? And so I said, send me a list. And it was the top 10 British actors of the day.

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  So you were on the same page tonally?

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  I had no, I didn't, I'd never imagined myself as Michael Caine.

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  But you need that, that gravamen.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Well, I, I saw what they were after. I saw what they were after and, um, Brian Cox's name was not on the list.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  And I said, okay, I see what you're after. Okay. Uh, I would like you to audition Brian Cox. And they said, who's Brian Cox? And I said, he's the best British actor you don't know.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And so they went to London and they, Dorchester come in the suite and they, within two minutes, they knew that, you know, he was perfect.

• 1:20:33Rich Roll?

  And why Brian Cox over Michael Caine?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  I'll tell you. Actors.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  Wonderful actors. Like, I mean, that, on that list was Christopher Plummer. I mean, you know, I mean, it was incredible.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  When they're playing a, uh, an antagonist, there's always this subtext of, love me, love me, love me. Yes, I'm a bad guy. Yes, I do terrible things, but my heart is in the right place.

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  A little, a little, uh, break the, break the fourth wall wink.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  It's, I, they don't have to do the, no, they're too good at that. They wouldn't have, they wouldn't, they wouldn't wink.

• 1:21:17Rich Roll?

  I'm not saying they actually would do that, but they're conveying that.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thing going on, a certain suffering, a certain whatever. There would be the love me thing. And as, as wonderful as those actors are, that, for me, that would be fatal.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  I do not want my students to love me.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  I want them to respect me. I want them to learn from me, but I do not want to be loved. I don't want a bunch of people chasing me around, you know, becoming, uh, you know, my, my flock. I, I hate that.

• 1:21:59Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  I, I, I.

• 1:22:02Rich Roll?

  You hate that, you hate the word guru, right? That gets applied.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's an insult to them. It's not only an insult to me, you know, and in the ancient meaning of it just meant teacher. But guru in the modern terms is somebody who, um, gets, um, uh, you know, innocent people to fall in love with them.

• 1:22:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's pejorative.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  And becomes a, yeah. Uh, and he milks them for all the money they can, he can get. No, I don't want that. So yeah, I hate the word guru and, and, um, I don't want followers. I don't want that. That's a sick relationship, you know, the mentor-student thing. And that, if it goes to the point where the student can't write without the mentor there, approving it, or whatever, I mean, how are you gonna grow up and be a writer? Writer is somebody who stands on their own.

• 1:22:53Rich Roll?

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

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  And, so anyway.

• 1:23:34Rich Roll?

  So Brian Cox is gonna drop, he's gonna drop the hammer.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Well, you see it now, you see it now in Succession.

• 1:23:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it augured, it augured Logan Roy in many ways. I mean, there's a lot of similarities in that portrayal.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Brian Cox is a wonderful actor who does not do that "love me" thing. And I knew Brian, I met him up, he's a student of mine, and he came to lecture up in Glasgow, and I knew him from his performances on the stage in the West End, and small movies, because I lived in England for 10 years. And so, that's how I knew Brian, because I'd seen him repeatedly on stage or screen. And he was a student. And I watched him in a play called Skylight, David Hare play. And I really admired that he's not asking for sympathy.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  And I could imagine another actor playing that character, woe is me and I'm misunderstood. And I really, I mean, I could imagine it, but he didn't. And so anyway, that's why Brian.

• 1:24:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, iconic. I mean, were you happy with how it came out?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. You know, I took my son Paul to a screening. And imagine, you know, it's one thing for me to see myself portrayed, but imagine for a son to see his father portrayed.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  And so after we went out to the parking lot and I said, so what did you think? And Paul said, Dad, he nailed you.

• 1:25:18Rich Roll?

  There you go.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  Did you ever speak with Nicolas Cage about it?

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  No, I've never met him.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I love it. I think it's fantastic. And, you know, I'm a Charlie Kaufman fan and a Spike Jonze fan, and that movie is a movie I probably revisit, you know, every year or so.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  But when you think about master storytellers, and I would consider both of those guys, you know, among that, that group, often you hear about how they flex the rules or they're the ones that are breaking the rules. So it's back to this idea that's, you know, a theme in adaptation, which is that, you know, the structure is the bad guy and the geniuses are the ones who are operating outside of it. And, you know, I think I want to hear your perspective on this because there's a lot of confusion, I think, around this. When you think about, you know, whether it's Tarantino or Charlie Kaufman, they are all operating within a structure that might elude the, the average viewer, but in truth, they're

• 1:26:23Rich Roll?

  all adhering to, you know, time-tested tenets of good storytelling.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Sure. But the word rule, rules is another word like journey and other words that I

• 1:26:40Rich Roll?

  Steve's taking off.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I react again.

• 1:26:43Rich Roll?

  Great to see you.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  There is no such thing in art. There are no rules. There's a form.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  And the form has a purpose. There's a painting, for example.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Almost virtually all paintings are rectangular. Why?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Because if they're square or circular, it reduces everything to a symmetry. Symmetry has no tension. It's boring to the eye, alright? And so, there's a, there's a form. The rectangular frame is designed to put objects in certain lines or colors, or whatever you're working with, in certain positions within that rectangle to create a tension and that, that holds the eye, moves the eye, alright? It's not a rule. Nobody says you have to paint in a rectangular frame. It's a form. It's used for a purpose. It creates tension. And so,

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  people think that storytelling has rules. And I really, you know, I react against that. There are no rules. There's a form. You know, that life goes out of balance at some point. And that it went out of balance makes us wonder how and why will these characters, if possible, restore the balance of life? And the story then is a struggle toward achieving that balance, positive or negative, or something ironic in between. And so, throwing life out of balance and the, the conflicts and the effort to put it back into balance is not a rule. It's, it's a form. If life doesn't go out of balance,

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  there's no story. It's a portrait, right? And so, you can't say you have to throw the life out of balance is a rule. It's just, it's the nature of the art form. It's the rectangular frame. It's, you know, the movement from imbalance toward balance is the rectangular frame of a story told in time. And, and I try to get writers to, to, to understand that. Nobody's telling you how to write. There are no rules. If you write something that is absolutely wonderful, no matter what, and intelligent, sensitive people read it, your career will be made. Because it's absolutely wonderful. Okay? Right. Alright? And you have captured something that is, that is compelling.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  How you do that, there's a form. And it, for thousands of years, this is how people telling stories have shaped a story. And there's certain elements that are constant. But you could do it like, um, uh, you know, like, like the, the, the film Betrayal. You could tell the story backwards if you want to. Betrayal is told backwards. Right? And you might remember Betrayal? I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I don't think I saw that. Starts with a, the first thing is a couple, years after their affair.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Uh, and where they were married, each married to somebody else, or she was married. And she says, he knows. Her husband has just learned about their affair. Her husband is this, is that character's best friend. Hmm. And then it works its way backwards. And then he goes backwards in time until the film ends on Boy Meets Girl. Hmm. And it works beautifully. By, it's an exercise in dramatic irony. At every point, we know more than the characters know. Mm-hmm. And says, you know, how, well, how will these characters react?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  You know, what, what made this, how will they react when they find out what we already know? Got it. So it's a, you can turn it on its head, uh, in my, the book I wrote on, um, character. I explored the whole spectrum of character, including radical characters from avant-garde, modernists, post-modernist plays, films and, and novels. Uh, because that's a choice. If you want to, you could write like Samuel Beckett and you, you know, create absolutely radical characters. And I'm going to do the same thing in, um, in, um, in the next book on story.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  I'm going to show them the full spectrum, which includes. Absurdist.

• 1:31:42Rich Roll?

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

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Rich Roll?

  When you read it, or when you hear it.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  But when you say "you," you mean us people in the business.

• 1:32:14Rich Roll?

  I suppose. But if you're

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  The general audience.

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  In any form of cinephile.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  The general audience. The general audience would not know the

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  There's like a trademark staccato, or Mametisms, or the way that Tarantino writes.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  That fellow writers

• 1:32:27Rich Roll?

  They are the authors of those works, very much so, but

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Because you don't want to suggest, Rick, that when people go to see something by Tarantino or Sorkin, that the average person who watches this is saying, "Oh, Sorkin." Ah, Tarantino. They're not. They're into the story and enjoying

• 1:32:50Rich Roll?

  You don't think so with Tarantino, even?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, even with Tarantino.

• 1:32:54Rich Roll?

  That's interesting.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  But then, I don't know, movie fans are fans, and maybe there is some of that. But the reason I call attention to that is that I wouldn't want somebody that I'm teaching thinking that they should develop an eccentric style of dialogue that calls attention to itself.

• 1:33:17Rich Roll?

  That's what I'm getting at. It's one thing if you're a master, but other than that, it feels like artifice and distraction that's being driven by ego, and a kind of "look at me" thing, as opposed to serving the story.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it doesn't work, it certainly does. But then, the other side of that coin is bad dialogue that calls attention to itself as bad dialogue.

• 1:33:42Rich Roll?

  Well, there's no shortage of that.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  Dialogue sucks.

• 1:33:44Rich Roll?

  Like, why are movies so bad, Robert? Come on.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Why have they gotten so bad?

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, August was horrific. The tectonic plates of industry and

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a, I don't know, I don't know how long cinema

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  will last as an art form. I think that in some time in the future, and I don't know how distant cinema will be like then, like ballet is today. It'll be a minor esoteric artsy, I don't know, but it won't last. There's a lot of reasons. Film is so expensive that they have to, they, you know, if they're gonna spend $200 million, it's gotta make a billion to be profitable, literally.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  It's gonna make five times the investment to turn a profit. And so you've got to think, you know, how can I get a billion dollars worth of people to watch this thing? So the commercial imperative is driven by the nature of things, and it's not like television or long-form streaming. You're asking people to get up, out of their house, get in their car, drive somewhere, park, go to the movies at a certain time, whether it's convenient or not. And so it's gotta be, it's gotta be a subject matter and a genre that would be, that's why I wrote-

• 1:35:29Rich Roll?

  This is action.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  That's why I wrote the book Action.

• 1:35:32Rich Roll?

  It is, you know, we're, it's a, it's a Star Wars, Marvel, Avatar universe that we're all living in, for better or worse. And, and the movies that are being made are movies at that massive scale that are either franchise spawning or franchise perpetuating. They're amusement park rides for, for the most part.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Rich Roll?

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

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  There's some wonderful action films.

• 1:36:18Rich Roll?

  I love going to the movies and I love a lot of these big movies, but it is interesting that action has, you know, you just came out with this book, Action. Action is the domineering genre that monopolizes most of what we see in the-

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's domineering.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, okay. There you go.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. But also, action merges with crime.

• 1:36:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Well, comedy now, also with all these big movies.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  But, television has sucked the audience away from, you know, going to the movies to see sensitive, character-complex stories on the big screen.

• 1:37:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I want to see more movies like Michael Clayton. Those movies are not going to get made for the cinema. But, while the aperture is closing and constricting on what is ending up, you know, at the Cineplex on Friday night, meanwhile, in television, it's expanded, you know, beyond in terms of the opportunities. I mean, it's basically infinite. And there is room for, I mean, you know, would Michael Clayton be made as a six-hour Netflix limited series? Maybe, you know, but that's something I would watch too.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Rich Roll?

  But I want to see- I like my drama serious. I don't like comedy in my sci-fi. I want my hard-boiled shit. I like, I like stuff about, I like espionage and CIA and MI6 and all, you know, it's like,

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:42Rich Roll?

  Those are, those are, those are long-form shows. They're not making movies. Aside from Mission Impossible, like, you know, you're not gonna see that in the movie theater anymore.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  No, but it isn't only the movies. I mean, there's, you know, novels.

• 1:38:56Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Uh, so more, more, people think that people have stopped reading. It's just not true. More, more novels are sold, are read and sold today, they're sold and read today than ever.

• 1:39:08Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  People spend more time, you know, with their, on their computer screen, reading novels than, than ever, or listening to the audio.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

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

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Stories, I think, as we discussed earlier, are equipment for living. So why do we go to the storyteller? Why do we read novels, go to the theater, film, television? It's to give us a deeper and deeper understanding of what is absurd and comic and, right? What is tragic and dark and painful, whatever, to see the full spectrum of life beyond anything we could possibly live.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  You get to enter into worlds you could never, ever know by the thousands. And so story expands your humanity and it also enriches your understanding of how and why people in the world do the things they do to equip you to live more successfully. The other is that the more you read, as you read, as you watch, when you go to the theater,

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  try to challenge yourself as an audience or a reader to read or to experience, to be an audience to something a little higher, better in some fashion, more complex, more difficult than what you just read or watched last month. And the wonderful thing about story is it's a museum. If you wish, you could go back and read the Odyssey or the Iliad. You could read the great plays written 2,500 years ago in Athens.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  And you can go back, you know, to the greatest of writers, Mark Twain and Tolstoy and, you know, and it's all there waiting for you. And every one of those great works is as valid today as it was when it was written. But you're going to have to learn to read in that language. If you're going to read Mark Twain, you're going to have to have an ear for that lingo. You know, Edgar Allan Poe, you have to have an ear for a whole different. And as a result, what I do today is, just to save myself some time or to give myself

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  some choices, I just pay attention to awards.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  The Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Emmys, whatnot.

• 1:42:47Rich Roll?

  Right, you mean just as a gatekeeper to quality.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  To see, to see who's.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Who, you know, and I look not for the winners, but for the nominees.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  You know, you can go online and see, you know, what were the 10 novels nominated for the long list for the Pulitzer, for the Booker Prize, or for the, you know, the Whitbread and others.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  And it gives you some guidance, otherwise it's just totally random. So I do that, but just, you know, don't have to do that, but, but you want to, to challenge yourself to experience more and more fascinating, even if it's difficult, you know, and a, a really good film, a really good novel is worth seeing or reading more than once. Just like, it's the same thing, the second time you see a really fine film, it's a whole other movie.

• 1:43:50Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  Same thing with a novel, the second time you read a really fine novel, you can't, you can't.

• 1:43:58Rich Roll?

  Well, it also depends on the phase of life you're in. We're, we're forced to read, you know, a certain set of novels, you know, throughout high school and college, we're at a certain phase of life, maybe we can connect with it, maybe we can't, but, you know, now many years later, some of those themes that seemed irrelevant to you then become highly resonant.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yes, they do.

• 1:44:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  The theater is literally a museum. What sustains the theater is we've got all these great playwrights from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Lilian Hellman and William Inge and on and on and on, of the 20th century, Eugene O'Neill, and the past, Shakespeare first amongst them, and the theater keeps

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  going, keeps alive, by bringing them back, these great plays from the past, and you see, when you watch Ibsen.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  Or Strindberg today, you watch a play like The Father and you see the ugliest marriage in the history of marriages and written in 1890. And it's fearsome and it's shocking and funny too, right?

• 1:45:15Rich Roll?

  It's always shocking to read something that's quite old and realize that it is as of the moment as anything.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  And it teaches you the lesson that everybody has to learn is that nothing changes. Human beings are human beings are human beings and they're not evolving. Society is, but human beings are not evolving.

• 1:45:43Rich Roll?

  Right, we got the same hardware. It's fascinating to me, clearly you're super intelligent and insightful and witty and you have a sort of brash confidence about you and you know, we didn't even get into much of your background, but you were an actor, you were a theater director and a director. You've worked in many capacities in the industry, outside the industry. You could have, to me, it feels like you could have become successful at any of these things that you chose. You could be running a studio, you could have become a professional screenwriter, a director, a producer, et cetera.

• 1:46:25Rich Roll?

  You make this decision to make your life about story and I'm just interested in like, why did you make that decision?

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  I found what I do best. Yes, I could have been, I was, I directed about over 60 plays and they were very successful and you know, and so I could have directed in the theater and then maybe moved on to film, television, whatever. I spent my life doing it and I'm sure I would have been fine.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  Here's what happened. I was a busy screenwriter in Hollywood. I sold every screenplay, I optioned. Every screenplay I wrote. One of them I've optioned recently again for the fifth time.

• 1:47:20Rich Roll?

  Hmm. It was written when?

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  In the eighties.

• 1:47:23Rich Roll?

  Wow. And it's been re-opsed?

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, people love it. People love it. And, uh, but they don't make it. Um, all the television that I wrote got made. And, and so I could see my work on screen. And I recognized that, yeah, this is of quality and, um, and it's professional and it's, it's fine, uh, but it's not Ingmar Bergman.

• 1:47:48Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:48:26Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  And so, um, I, I did what my instincts led me to, to do, which is to become the best at what I can do. And so that's, that's why I write about writing, cause I love doing it. And it matters, apparently. So, um, uh, so I'm, I, I remember that I made a choice. I, I can remember it very clearly. I could pursue, um, screenwriting. And I was making a living at a house in Santa Monica, you know? Swimming pool and all that. Um, and you know, maybe someday, you know, who knows?

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Uh, do something special. Um, but.

• 1:49:18Rich Roll?

  There was something about.

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  There was.

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  Teaching and the interaction with the students.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Rich Roll?

  That lit you up in a, in a new and different way.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  It's, it's really, um, it lifted my heart in the, you know, to, to, to see their faces. While I'm lecturing and to see light bulbs going on as they get it. And they, I mean, they literally go, ah, they gasp at times, right?

• 1:49:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it is a performance, right? It is theater.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's that.

• 1:49:45Rich Roll?

  Your writing, you're performing, there's jokes, you know, there's an entertainment aspect to it. So, you know, it kind of pulls on all of those skill sets.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they, and they, they under, it helps them understand what they, I, I tell you, the old, the pros who come into the lectures that are already, you know, successful.

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Um. Not the least of which being people like Akiva Goldsman and like David Bowie took your class, right?

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Who's great.

• 1:50:15Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  David Bowie.

• 1:50:18Rich Roll?

  Did you interact with him?

• 1:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. He, yeah, of course. He, um, he was the, one of the best laughers that I've ever had. I mean, I, the, the lectures are, as you were pointing out, you know, full of, uh, comedy or humor, humor, wit. And, um, David Bowie just belly laughs. It was incredible. He, I mean, literally his knees would come up to his chin. He'd laugh so hard.

• 1:50:43Rich Roll?

  Did you see Moon Age Daydream yet?

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Hmm?

• 1:50:46Rich Roll?

  Have you seen the documentary?

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:50:48Rich Roll?

  Brett Morgan's documentary? Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Bowie because that movie is, is a work of brilliance.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Is it really?

• 1:50:56Rich Roll?

  You have to check it out. Yeah, it's incredible. It's truly incredible. It's a documentary. I mean, it's Bowie's life, but it's, I think, to, to coin like what Brett Morgan, the filmmaker, said about it, he was trying to make a movie about David Bowie if David Bowie was making a movie about his life.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:13Rich Roll?

  So it's a very surrealistic kind of sonic experience that is nonlinear in any way, but, but which really conveys the sensibility of this, this artist. Yeah. I highly recommend you check it out. But anyway, I interrupted you.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Um, uh.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  He's the perfect example of what I was talking about. That it's very moving for me to see someone get it.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  And you see it in their eyes in an instant. It's not, you know, they're, there's this look.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  And writers who have been, you know, they're in their, you know, 30s and 40s, 50s or whatever,

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  often come to me on the break or after. And they're elated. And they say, "I solved my script. I solved my novel at about 11 o'clock this morning." Because of, you know, and that's...

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I live for that.

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you think about legacy at all? As you're kind of concluding this tour?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Well, there's books. You know, there's books. And then, and all of my lectures are recorded. And now that I've, this is the last, this is, you know, the farewell tour. So I'm not going to do live performances anymore. And so now, if people want, we've recorded everything.

• 1:53:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  And so all of that is out there for them. And the books, whether, you know, I've read all my books for the audio version. They can read them or, you know, listen to them, whatever.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  But every writer who writes fiction or nonfiction would like to think

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  that what they expressed, what they had to say, will live on after them.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  For some period of time, you know, not forever, you know, can't all be Shakespeare. But it's a form of immortality, or at least temporary immortality. And so I don't, no, I don't think about my legacy because I've already taken care of that. I wrote the books. That's my legacy.

• 1:53:52Rich Roll?

  They will live on.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, Story is now 25 years old, the book. And it sells as much or more today than it did 25 years ago.

• 1:54:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm not surprised.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  So if I had died right after I wrote Story, it would still be doing well 25 years later. So I won't have any, I can't say I won't have any regrets because I made a lot of mistakes in life. But when I die, I will die with a sense of satisfaction. I did what I set out to do.

• 1:54:29Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that's a good, beautiful place to end it. Thank you. It really was an honor to spend time with you.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  Oh, it was great fun. It was great fun.

• 1:54:39Rich Roll?

  I really enjoyed it. Best of luck with the end of this tour. I know you've got a big day tomorrow. So I appreciate you taking time. Everybody should definitely pick up Action: The Art of Excitement for screen, page, and game. And don't forget Story, of course.

• 1:54:57Speaker 01

  Five other books.

• 1:54:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you've got dialogue, you've got character. We didn't even get into Storynomics and the power of story and business and all of that. Maybe you'll come back and talk to me some more about that. But crazy respect for everything that you've done in the world. And I think it's a great service. And it was just brilliant to meet you today.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:55:20Rich Roll?

  Thank you. Cheers.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 1:55:34Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting

• 1:56:19Rich Roll?

  the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Salis, Dan Drake,

• 1:57:03Rich Roll?

  and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace.

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  Plants. Namaste.