Randall Wallace

Randall Wallace is a screenwriter, director, and producer. He is best known for writing the screenplay of "Braveheart", later making his directorial debut with "The Man in the Iron Mask", and going on to direct "We Were Soldiers", "Secretariat", and "Heaven Is for Real". Braveheart became a critically and commercially successful film, winning multiple Academy Awards and earning Wallace a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He is the author of Living the Braveheart Life, part-autobiography and part-masterclass, in which he shares the personal journey behind writing Braveheart and explores the life lessons and archetypes within the story that continue to inspire audiences. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

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

• 0:25Speaker 00

  My wife, her mother was from a deeply Mormon family. And her father was Irish Catholic and war hero. And when they decided to get married, both sides of the family refused to go to the wedding unless the other person would convert. So neither one of them ever went back to church again. It was like, okay, then we're done with y'all. If that's how y'all are gonna be, we're done. But she, because of her Mormon ancestors, knew her heritage. And I didn't know any of mine. I had heard that the name Wallace came from Scotland, but that was it. And a cousin of mine had been in the army and had visited Scotland.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  And he had come back with a, he said, "There are Wallaces in Scotland." So my wife was a dancer, amazing dancer. And she didn't really want to have children, which we hadn't had that discussion, but I really wanted to have children. So we're trying to work that out. And she loved to travel. And she said in her very sort of Irish way, "Okay, if you get me pregnant, you gotta take me to Europe. If you'll agree to do that..." And we were like really poor. I mean, we didn't have any money. So I go, "Done, we'll figure out a way. Get pregnant." She's four months pregnant. We go to London and we're just planning to go around Europe.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  And I said, "Well, you know, while we're here, Scotland's not that far away. Maybe we could run up to Scotland and I could see..." Because I had in the back of my mind, I'd like to know. So we go up to Edinburgh and we walk into Edinburgh Castle. And there, at the entrance, are statues. And one is Robert the Bruce. And I knew of Robert the Bruce because I loved history and I knew he was Scotland's greatest king. And the other one's Wallace. Wallace? That's my name. That's my name. And there's a little guy there, a member of the Black Watch. And he looks like he's about five foot four and he's got on a kilt and looks just tough as pine knot.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  And I say, uh, excuse me, uh, this Wallace, who is this Wallace? And he goes, oh, he is our greatest hero. And I go, greatest hero? And I'm elbowing the pregnant wife. Greatest hero, honey. Greatest hero. And so, so then I go, well, I know Robert the Bruce fought the English. Was William Wallace an ally of his in fighting the English? And this guy goes, no one will ever know for sure. Which of course for a writer is the magic words. But our legends say that Robert the Bruce may have been one of the conspirators who betrayed William Wallace

• 3:21Speaker 00

  into the hands of the English to clear the way for himself to become the king. Wow. And Rick, exactly. That's all you needed to hear? That was lightning bolt. And I went, that might be the biggest story I've ever heard. Because it was like being told, what if there was something so noble, powerful in the way William Wallace lived and died that it transformed Robert the Bruce from being someone who would betray the country's greatest hero into becoming the country's greatest king? Yeah. And I thought, that's like hearing Saint Peter and Judas were the same person. Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Which in a sense is Saint Peter's story. But what if you go from the worst that you can imagine to being transformed? And I've always been fascinated with what's the moment of transformation? When someone quits hating? When someone stops doing something that's self-destructive? What happened at that? Moment where the tide turned. So this was amazing thing, but I've got a baby on the way. And I'm really struggling for money. And I also didn't feel like I was like ready to write it yet. It was 10 years before I sat down to do it. Now, get back to Virginia.

• 4:47Rick Rubin?

  Did you start doing research right away from that moment?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  No, I'll tell you a spooky story with this. I, I looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica. And it said, there are no reliable, really historical records about William Wallace. Other than we have an idea that he lived, we have an idea that he died. But what we do know is that his stories have inspired his people for centuries.

• 5:14Rick Rubin?

  Enough for there to be the statue next to the greatest king.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 5:18Rick Rubin?

  So clearly, there's something.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:22Rick Rubin?

  But was he like written out of history?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  You know, there, there was certainly was an aspect of this of when you get disemboweled and drawn and quartered and your pieces are, you know, sent to the four corners of the kingdom and say, don't be like this guy. There's a suppression of, of his history. And I've met people that say they're descendants of William Wallace. I fully believe I am, and I'll tell you why in a moment, but nobody could prove they are because he was an outlaw. His, his children would have been, would have been killed too.

• 5:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Uh, so if you were a child of his, you would have kept that quiet.

• 6:00Rick Rubin?

  Understood.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  So I looked up what I could, but there was really nothing to find about him. So cut to 10 years later. I've started to work for Steve Cannell.

• 6:12Rick Rubin?

  Steve Cannell created The Rockford Files and Beretta, a lot of great TV shows.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 6:19Rick Rubin?

  What was it like in those days of television?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Well, Cannell, Cannell was amazing, Rick. I met him through Mike Post, who's probably the most successful television composer of all time. Cause Mike did all of Cannell's shows, he did Steve Baczko's shows. I think he does Law and Order and all those. I mean, just his, his body of work is really amazing.

• 6:41Rick Rubin?

  How did you know Post?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Okay, this is the greatest story. When people say, you know, how do you go from? A kind of a frustrated, broken, emotionally and financially broken singer-songwriter who packs up all the stuff he owns in Nashville in a Toyota and drives here, knowing nobody. And how do you end up in the movie business? It's like, okay. So I always worked out a lot because it made me feel.

• 7:11Rick Rubin?

  Endorphins.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yes. And I felt that I was growing rather than declining. And that was crucial for me. When I was in Nashville, I was working maybe 100 hours a week at this place called Opryland. And I really loved it, and that was one of the reasons I spent so many. But when I got signed at Tree Music, which was a big BMI publisher in those days, then I had a songwriting contract and I would get up at 4:30 every morning and write a song every day. So I had that routine sort of thing going.

• 7:44Rick Rubin?

  Do a lot of songwriters that you know work that way?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  I don't think they get up early necessarily, but in Nashville, there is a big thing like Tom T. Hall. Said, "You've got to write a song every day." And I've heard stories from, I mean, of course, you know McCartney directly. I know guys that know him, but they'll say if he sits down at the piano to write, he'll write four or five songs before he stands up. They won't be finished. He does a thing. And I love it in your book, you talk about the difference between my song could be better and my song, if my song isn't any good. Or there's two different ways of looking.

• 8:27Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  I wanted to develop that discipline and that point of view of I had to plunge in and if it was a bad idea, get the bad ideas out of the way. But you don't know if it's a bad idea until you let it go.

• 8:42Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  So I just wanted to get the movement going. And that always worked for me. People would say, you know, what do you do when you have writer's block? And I go, I don't know. I've never had it, never had it. Because I've always given myself permission to. Look at what I've done and say that's gonna lead me somewhere, but to get there, it's like a sailboat to me. Unless it's moving, you can't steer it.

• 9:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  You're just drifting. So I always wanted to be moving. So I had a time where my income was just doubling every year and I was, my, my career in TV was really taking off. And the kind of discipline that I had, I'd get up early in the morning, get it done.

• 9:27Rick Rubin?

  Were there tight deadlines in TV writing?

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. TV is, the thing that I admire about it, and yet the liability in it, is that Tuesday comes every seven days and you're running in front of a train. So you have to do it as well as you can do it in the time, rather than as well as you can do it.

• 9:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Like in features, you kind of get to say.

• 9:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's ready when it's ready. But in TV, it's ready when it's Tuesday.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  That's exactly it. That's exactly. And so.

• 9:56Rick Rubin?

  And were there many writers working on the same shows? How did it work? Tell me the structure.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  They, they would have a team of writers, but the teams were really small. And you end up with kind of, like you have a team of horses.

• 10:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Eight horses there. There's one or two of them that are pulling all the way. There's one guiding it and probably one of them that's, that's doing the, the main pulling. And the others are just kind of along for the ride. There's a lot of that in TV. And Cantor recognized that. You know, my attitude was, I may not be the fastest, but if you give me the ball, I will score a touchdown or I will die.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  That's just, that was just. And also, there's kind of, there's an exuberance about, like a guy like Cantor, he wrote them himself. And Cantor was dyslexic, profoundly dyslexic. So when he was in school, he was at the bottom of every single class. And one of my sons is dyslexic, has the same, most stunningly brilliant creator of stories. They just spin out like, like breathing. And Cantor was like that, too. But then he found, he just, he loved writing.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  And Steve and I lit up with each other and I got promoted really fast. He said it was the fastest he'd ever promoted anybody, but I went from like walking in the door to executive producer in less than a year.

• 11:27Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And I was suddenly making a lot of money. Then there was a writer's strike and it went on and on. I had just, because I had a long-term contract with Cannel, which guaranteed me a really solid income for the next several years. And I was his protege. He had many proteges, by the way, but they, they called me his fair-haired Goy. Because, you know, it was like, Steve was a jock and, you know, I was, you know, the southern guy and so we enjoyed each other. So the writer's strike goes on and on.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  I had just bought a new home and because I had a contract that I thought made me secure and I hadn't, had been really frugal with my savings, but I spent my savings to remodel the house because it was like one time, we're gonna make this for the boys to grow up in. And the strike goes on and on and all my savings are gone.

• 12:30Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  And I got sideways with Steve. You know, it's a mentor protege thing. If the protege starts to spin upward some, like I had my first novels were being published and Steve wanted novels and, and I was also, I had, I'd made a feature deal to write a feature screenplay, which nothing ever came of that, but it, but I had made the, because I was always kind of looking down the line and Steve and I got sideways a bit and the strike ended and Steve's company was starting to unravel. So.

• 13:06Rick Rubin?

  You think it was based on the strike? Did that impact that company?

• 13:11Speaker 00

  I think it was a combination of things. The strike did not help, but in a certain way, strikes helped Steve because he was so facile. The last several months I worked for Steve, the two of us together in eight weeks did six hours of television, which was just unheard of. Writing them all, producing them all, editing them, the whole thing was like this. And it was just the two of us. So that's the thing. When you get into that crunch time, you don't have time to be developing other writers or have them write a script that may not come in. And rewriting it is harder than just doing it yourself the first time.

• 13:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  So that's why it was just a ton of pressure in TV. In any case, the strike ended and Steve's company started to unravel. And they weren't offering me a contract. And I decided I would leave. And I went down, I was packing up my office. And my son Andrew, we were packing up my office. And he says, Daddy, how are we gonna eat? And the weird thing is that I was wondering that.

• 14:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  And I sat down and put him in my lap and said, well, son, I've spent the last several years doing really well, making money and making Mr. Cantle more money and making him more famous. But nobody knows us. And what I'm gonna try to do is make us more money and let people know who I am. And he went, great, sounds good. Hopped off my lap. And but I was knotted up, right? And I got to the point that I couldn't write.

• 14:50Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Not that I didn't know what I wanted to write, but my hands were shaking and my stomach was knotted and I couldn't eat. And I got down on my knees and I said a prayer. When my father had his breakdown, I was the same age as my sons were.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  And so what I prayed was, what matters to me right now is my sons.

• 15:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And I know my wife's gonna be okay. She's smart, she's tough. I'll be okay no matter what. I could be a janitor, honestly. My pride is not such that I couldn't get something out of that. But I don't want them to see me come apart. If maybe they don't need to grow up in this house in Encino with five bedrooms and a tennis court and swimming pool and German cars in the driveway. Maybe there'll be better men if they live in a little house with no indoor plumbing. And if that's what you want for them, then please bring that on and help me bear it. But if I go down in this fight, let me go down with my flag flying.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Not on my knees to Hollywood. Not worshiping what they tell me they want.

• 16:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Let me do the story that I want my sons to see. And I stood up and walked back without any more shaking, without any more knots, and sat down. And that led directly to Braveheart.

• 16:19Rick Rubin?

  And did you sell everything and move to a small house?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  No, I was able to get through. I was able to hang on just by our fingernails.

• 16:27Rick Rubin?

  It worked out.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Until a big script sale with a story called Love and Honor. And then Braveheart. And so suddenly it's like, you know, I was doing the stories like I wanted to do.

• 16:42Rick Rubin?

  So you have the idea for Braveheart on a trip to Scotland. And now 10 years later, what happens next with Braveheart?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  So I started by, I think you'll love this, I'm deep into your book, by the way. I know that this is like right in line with what you're thinking. I've written multiple drafts of Braveheart without having any historical research at all. And none seems to exist. Even Winston Churchill wrote about William Wallace, but he said the same thing as the encyclopedia, that his legends

• 17:17Rick Rubin?

  We don't really know.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  have inspired as people we don't really know. So I write this story. And I don't know if they have Glass in the windows, or glass hasn't been, or if they're using crossbows or longbows, I don't care. If I was on a battlefield outnumbered, well, would I need to hear from the leader to make me stay? And that's how I was writing the story. And I knew about Robert the Bruce, and I'm imagining the back and forth and all of those things. So, in other words, I wrote the why of the story. And the why told me the how. So, I'm about eight drafts into this, and I just thought, well, maybe it's time if I

• 18:01Speaker 00

  looked up some of these facts to know. So, I go to the library, and they have in those days, the Dewey Decimal System, the card catalog is still, you know, functioning. And I find three books on William Wallace, and they're all at UCLA. And two of them are commentaries, but one of them purports to be like a diary of somebody who was with William Wallace. So, there's this kid coming to the house, who goes to UCLA, comes on his motorcycle with a backpack and a, you know, kickboard and swimming implements in his backpack, and he's a great kid. And I said to him, hey, would you mind going by the UCLA library?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, I've got the numbers. And he comes back the next Tuesday, and he says, well, I got the two, but I don't think they're gonna be, you know, much help. They're in Latin, and they're like... But there's this other one, and it's in what's called deep storage. It's like a bin of books that have never been checked out, and they're slated for destruction. So, they put them in deep storage, and then nobody asks for them in the next five years or something, they're just destroyed. So, he said, this one is in that. And they can't find it easily, they have to dig through the whole bin to find it. But I put in the request, and so, a couple of weeks later, he comes in, and he's got this book. Rick, I should have brought it today.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  This book is 270 years old.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  I mean, at Duke, and I'm sure at UCLA, if they think it's a valuable book, there's a rare book room and you go in, you put on white gloves and you can... But he's got it in his backpack and it's 270 years old.

• 19:47Rick Rubin?

  And they were gonna destroy it.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  They were gonna destroy it.

• 19:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  It's in rhyming Scots verse because a guy named Blind Harry, who was not blind...

• 20:01Speaker 00

  He was the Ric Flair of Scotland and he would go through the Highlands and recite this epic poem, and it's like 200 pages, of rhyming Scottish couplets. And it tells the story of William.

• 20:14Rick Rubin?

  And that's how they remembered it.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  That's how you remembered it.

• 20:16Rick Rubin?

  That's how they remembered it, through the rhyme.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  And it has this really elaborate foreword of about 30 pages, but the pages are like ash. So, I read this thing and it's got incidents that are in my screenplay.

• 20:34Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  The thing where William Wallace encounters a guy on the battlefield and he tears his helmet off to kill him and sees it's Robert the Bruce, that was in my screenplay. And that was in this Blind Harry thing. And I'm like, okay, this has gotten really spooky. All right. It just confirmed for me that I was on the right path. It also made me feel that I was a descendant, even though I know this is all, you could say it's superstitious stuff, of course. But, cut to we're filming Braveheart, we're on the field, filming the Battle of Sterling. And there was an EPK promotional crew there and they...

• 21:19Speaker 00

  The writers just like furniture, but they go, hey, did you do some research? You know, they were asking me this. And I said, well, you know, there wasn't really much research to do. But I mentioned this book. Cut to two years later, the movie's about to come out. And they say, you know, we're putting together our final press kit for this and you tell the story about this old book. Could we come to your house and film you reading it? So I go, sure. And so, I get the book. I go up to this restaurant on Ventura Boulevard where I like to have lunch and write and make notes and think. And I open the book thinking I'll find which passage I want to read to them.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  At the start of the actual text of the story, like after the preface that talks about William Wallace and this man named Hamilton and Mr. Blair, who was supposedly William Wallace's personal chaplain. The body of the story starts and there's a handwritten inscription. And I'm sitting there and I hadn't ever read this inscription because I was so in awe of the book. And the inscription says, "This book is the gift of Lindsey Dove to the Tuttles, London, May 1795." And I look at that and I go, it's 1995.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  It's 200 years to the year. May 24th, the day the movie opens. Wow, wild.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  How did it go from script to movie? Well, I skipped that part. I write the script. I give it to Rebecca Pollack, married to Hutch Parker, Becky. And Becky is Sidney Pollack's daughter. And she got her dad's brilliance. I had written this story, Love and Honor, which is about the American Revolution and a young cavalryman is sent to the Russia of Catherine the Great to save the American Revolution. So it's an epic, romantic adventure. And Becky had tried to buy it and her company hadn't had the money, but she had put in to Dave Wirtshafter, who was my agent then,

• 23:44Speaker 00

  "I want his next two scripts, Sight Unseen." And we didn't even negotiate that deal. It was for minimum, by the way. But if anybody believes in me that much, I mean, I haven't known anybody would buy anything, so great. So I go into Becky and she said, "What do you want to write?" And I said, "Well, there's this guy named William Wallace and he ends up disemboweled and beheaded, but here's what he did." Rick, I don't think it took five minutes. And she goes, "My God, go write that." It's really the strangest thing to jump. I had a president of a studio called me after he saw Braveheart and he said,

• 24:29Speaker 00

  "Man, this is the greatest movie I've ever seen. Now, don't start thinking you know everything." And I said, "Thank you for saying that, with all due respect. If I had come into your office three years ago and said, "I've got a story about a guy that runs around the Scottish Highlands in a kilt, and in the end he gets disemboweled and quartered and beheaded, in the end of the movie, would you have thrown me out of your office?" And he goes, "Yeah." I go, "What lesson am I supposed to draw from that?" Yeah. I mean, it's an honest question. Who am I supposed to listen to? Yeah. So Becky became a big champion.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  And when I turned in the draft, I left out Robert the Bruce of my first draft because the script was going really long. So I thought, "Well, he's not really the main character." And Becky read the script and went, "I love, love, love this." And she spent like 30 minutes telling me what she loved. Then she said, "You know, you had mentioned this guy, Robert the Bruce, and maybe I ought to think about putting that in." Yeah. In the journalist part. And I couldn't wait to get back and get to work as opposed to the people that go, "Okay, it's good. Now, here are all the things wrong. And you spend an hour telling me what's wrong and in two seconds saying they like it and you don't believe them." Yeah. Becky was the opposite.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  So I had Robert the Bruce back end of the story, gave it to her. She called and said, "Strangest thing's happening. When we put out a script for all the executives to read, their assistants read it first. And they're in kind of a big bullpen area, and they're all sitting there crying, all of them. They've never seen anything like it. And we think we've got something here." And she said, "Who do you want to play William Wallace?" And I said, "The only one I can think of is Mel Gibson because he's..." Based on what? He had the masculinity and the edge and the vulnerability, the legitimate.

• 26:33Rick Rubin?

  What did you see him in that was the example?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Lethal Weapon was amazing in that he had this wild, crazy, like, almost fun streak. And he had this tortured vulnerability, like, I don't know if I can go on. And he really played those things with enormous depth. And then he had played Hamlet, and then he'd done a movie called Man Without a Face. So those things showed me that he had ambitions beyond just being the current.

• 27:10Rick Rubin?

  Action movie star.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Action movie guy. So we send it to him, we don't hear, we don't hear. And then my agent calls me and says, are you sitting down? And I go, no. He goes, well, you might want to sit down. Mel Gibson wants to have breakfast with you tomorrow morning. Oh, okay. Now, it's not that I wasn't excited, but I've, I've met enough stars from music and other things. When I was at Opryland in Nashville, I met a bunch of country music stars and they're people. But I also know the valence that exists when you're around a person who could just by a notion, you know, just like, you know, I've always liked Vikings or something.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  And then if you launch thirty million dollars of development, because every studio is trying to put together a movie to get this guy. And how people start to try to say, what does he want? And try to say what they think he wants, rather than what they believe. So I walked around the neighborhood and I prayed sincerely, please don't let me kiss his ass. I mean, those were the words. Because I'll have no value to myself and no value to anybody, no value to him. So we walk in and we sit down at the Four Seasons. And we're sitting there, it's Mel, it's his partner, it's the chairman of the studio, it's Becky, and it's me, and Mel.

• 28:39Rick Rubin?

  And he's read the script?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  He's read the script. And he breaks the ice by saying, "So, William Wallace, Randall Wallace, are you guys related?" That was the opening. And I go, "Well, you know, it's sort of like saying, you know, something causes cancer. You can't prove it," you know? And I go, "I can't prove I am, but nobody can prove I'm not." And he kind of laughed. Rick, in like two minutes, I'm like a tent revivalist and I'm leaning across the table and I'm pounding on it with my fist. And I go, "Listen, here's how it is. Bottom line. Every movie has an underlying message. Whether it wants to or not, it has a message.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  And the message of most movies is, the guy with the biggest biceps and the cutest temples and the greenest money and the bluest eyes, he gets the girl. That's what most movies say. This movie says, "If you're faithful to your heart, even if they cut it out of your chest, you prevail." That's the movie I want to make. That's the movie I want my sons to see. You want to make that movie, you need to say yes. You don't want to make that movie, you need to say no." And everybody at the table kind of sat back like, "Oh, that Mel." Lean forward. And it's like, this dude's in. And nobody says anything else.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  It's like, "Well, I guess we better get back to the office." And everybody's like that. And they all get up and we're standing outside in the parking lot and nobody's looking at me and nobody's talking to me. And I get, my car comes and I'm driving away, my cellphone rings and my agent's, "What the hell did you say?" And I start, "Well, somebody had to talk." And he goes, "No, no. The chairman of the studio, Alan Ladd, just called me and said, 'I want to double Randy Wallace's deal. And I want to make the next movie that he writes for us, he directs.'" That's incredible. Just from that first meeting. From that meeting. So, the two scripts that I did for them, that studio, were Braveheart and Man in the Iron Mask. Wow. And I did them both for scale.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  It's like, minimum. But the next script I wrote, Pearl Harbor, set a record for an original script sale. So, you know how, it's weird. What you're getting paid is not like specifically tied to the thing. So Mel, I knew he was, but he wouldn't say yes. And it went on and on, month after month, and he didn't say yes. So I said, okay, I'm gonna go to Scotland. What do you think that was about? Him not saying yes? He wanted to direct. Had he ever directed before? He had directed one thing, and that was Man Without a Face, which was a tiny little movie. But he really wanted to direct this. But he didn't want to say that.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  So he was on the fence, like, he's not saying no, but he's not saying yes, because he wanted to get to the, he wanted to get to the place where he felt like he could make the argument to direct it. And, you know, the studio was wanting a big budget movie, but a big budget director. You know, can we get Ridley Scott? Can we get someone like that? Yeah. So, nothing's happening. And I decided, okay, if Mel doesn't do it, instead of getting 80 million dollars, I might get 80,000, but I'm not gonna not do this movie. Even if, even if the battle scenes have to be just recounted over a campfire. Yeah. I'm gonna make this movie.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  So, I go to Scotland, and I find the guys who are battle reenactors on Highlander. They had had three broken noses after they yelled "cut." So I knew these were the guys. And I called them, you know, that British dial tone, and the guy's name, who was the leader of the Clan Wallacees, S.E.O.R.A.S. Wallace.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  So I was unfamiliar with the name, so I called and said, and somebody goes, "Hello?" And I said, "May I speak with Seorice Wallace?" And they go, "Who?" And I go, "Seorice Wallace?" "Shudders, you'd be looking for Shudders." "Oh, yeah, Shudders." And he comes, "Hello?" And I go, "Shudders, my name's Randall Wallace, and I've written a story about William Wallace. And I have a movie studio that wants to, I didn't mention Mel, a movie studio that wants to do it. And I'd like to come to Scotland and talk with you." I thought the line had gone dead. I go, "Hello, hello?" And he goes, "I cannot speak. I'm standing up on the back of me fucking neck."

• 33:30Speaker 00

  And so I go, "Well..." Then I go, he goes, "What would you like?" And I said, "Well, I want to come and tour the Highlands and take pictures." He goes, "Oh, aye." I said, "And I'd like to see you fight." He goes, "Oh, aye." And I said, "Well, okay, I guess I'll see you in two weeks." And he goes, "Ah, Randall." And I go, "Yeah?" He says, "If anybody needs to die for this to happen, it's no problem."

• 33:58Speaker 00

  And Rick, he wasn't kidding. Yeah, you went into the movie. He went, I went into the movie. Yeah. So I go to Scotland with my wife. We tour the Highlands. We film these guys fighting. I went and bought an Nikon camera with a bunch of lenses to learn photography, which I knew nothing about, really. And I made a slideshow. And I came back and I showed it to Alan Ladd and Becky. And Laddie goes, "I want you to show this to Mel." So I went and went to Mel's office. We sat down and I showed him the pictures and laid them all out on the thing. And I told him about these crazy battle reenactors. And he had long pause and he looked down at the pictures. And he didn't look up at me, he just looked down at his pictures.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  And he went, "I want to direct this. What would you think of that?" And I went, I'm the all-in man, be there right there, whatever it takes, full support. And then he calls the studio and says, I want to direct. So.

• 34:57Rick Rubin?

  And then was the studio open to that right away or it took time?

• 35:01Speaker 00

  They were open to that, but Mel wanted to direct and not star in because he really wanted to establish himself as a director.

• 35:07Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  So he was saying, I'll direct it, but I won't star in. And they were saying, you can direct it, but you must also star in. And they worked that out finally in that. Of course, you know, I don't think it could have possibly worked out better.

• 35:25Rick Rubin?

  What do you remember about the shoot? Were you there for the majority of the shoot?

• 35:29Speaker 00

  I was there for some. And there was a real time when I I felt left out. I felt like my father felt on my sister's wedding day. You know, they were taking pictures and stuff and my sister there with with her new husband. And my father said, sort of under his breath, sort of to me and sort of not, he said, she's got another shoulder to cry on now. And I thought it was one of the most revealing things of a father's love and how you have to let your children go and all of that. And I felt like, man, I, people would come in and ask a question and I would be, and then I.

• 36:12Rick Rubin?

  Not your job anymore.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Not my job. I always got to do it. And we were, we were having dinner and London, just Mel and me. And this was really funny too for me, Rick, because Mel was the biggest star on earth at that point. And I was a totally unknown screenwriter. You know, it's my first movie being made and it was really funny because in in England, people would come up to you at a table and go, oh, excuse me, Mr. Gibson, I'm so terribly sorry, but my niece just terribly fancies you. And could you possibly give me an autograph? And they would do that. In Scotland, a guy would come up with his wife and go, hey, Mel, kiss my wife. And the woman would grab him like, and you know, like, like it was, so it's really different.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And we'd just gotten back from Scotland and we're talking and Mel's telling me about, we're trying to cast a certain role. He says, I've found exactly the right guy to play as the key role. I don't want to say which one because I don't say which actor. But he said. I found a perfect guy. He has no idea who he is. This guy's, he's a terrible human being. He would, and I go, oh, why would you want him on the, in the cast? And Mel said, look, Randy, and I think, and Mel's super smart. And I think, you know, he could sense what I was feeling about everything. And he said, the truth is, writers write, directors direct, actors act from their essence

• 37:41Speaker 00

  as a human being. And I want to cast people who are in their essence, the character I want them to play. And he said, this script is you. It is just bold and its heart is right out there. It is you. You gave your all to it. I'm going to give my all to it in the same way.

• 38:02Rick Rubin?

  From the time that he agreed to do it until the shoot, did you have a lot of discussion with him? Did it evolve much? Or was it basically the script that he read? That's what got shot?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  It's really funny, Rick. It went through a journey. I'd done a lot of TV, but TV is really different from, from a feature. And it was so wonderful to have this experience. We sit down and the first thing he asked me in our first sort of story discussion was, tell me everything you wrote and took out.

• 38:36Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  What a great sort of thing.

• 38:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  And we went through a couple of things where he was asking if it was possible for me to combine a couple of scenes. There were, for example, the scenes in which his wife appears to him in dreams were really evocative to me. And I'd put two of them, two dream sequences, actually three dream sequences before the final thing when he sees her as he's being executed, which to me was one of the best moments. When I wrote that, I wept. I didn't see that coming.

• 39:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. As the writer, you didn't see it coming?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  As a writer, I did not see it coming.

• 39:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  It's like I got to the end and I thought, the axe is dropping toward his throat. I can't show the axe hit his throat.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  So what do we show the audience at this point? And I thought, well, what would he look at? The last moment of his life. Oh, he knows his friends would be there. So I wrote, "In the last moment of his life, William Wallace turns his eyes to Hamish and Stephen. And between them, she is." I hadn't seen it coming, and I'm bald. I sat at my desk, and I'm bald. And I gotta jump ahead for a minute. A few years back, I was in Austin, Texas, doing a charity screening of Braveheart, and I hadn't seen it screened in a long time. And at the end of it, I stood up on stage, walked up to do a Q and A. And the first person who stood up, nineteen-year-old girl, woman.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  And she stands up and she says, "Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question. I just want to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago. And before he died, he told me to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he loved me." So I'm like, okay. It took me, it probably took me five minutes before I could talk again. And just that, that sense of, I knew that, for me, it was, it was all of that. And I believed that it was that for Mel, too. But you don't know. You don't know, you know, as you go through the thing. And there are some ideas that feel, you know, out of place,

• 40:59Speaker 00

  and there are some that feel like they're extending it. So there's a process, I think. I think it would be fair to say for Mel, if I think of the times when I've had a script that's come to me, and maybe I'm rewriting, but, but that I'm directing, is you gotta take it all apart and put it back together again. And the fact that you've taken it all apart doesn't mean it's a different thing when you put it back together. But in the end, it's probably more verbatim than anything I've ever done, including the things I've directed myself.

• 41:32Rick Rubin?

  Do you think that by taking things apart, you get to understand them better?

• 41:38Speaker 00

  I don't know, because this way of understanding is not the knowledge of every detail. Like when you're directing or when you're writing, like, what's the story about?

• 41:50Rick Rubin?

  So every decision is in service to the bigger goal?

• 41:56Speaker 00

  That's what I think, yes. Now, having said that, the paradox is, you find one twist in something that illuminates all these other things. Like when I'm, when I'm starting to write a story, I'm just looking for any place where I find fire. And just writing a scene until a character says something I didn't, I never said before.

• 42:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Surprises me with what they do, and all of a sudden, like, I'm... How is it that this character that I'm writing just surprised me and said something I didn't see? Or Muran appears at William Wallace's death? Where did that come from? Now, you say inherent and all these other things, yes and no? I didn't see it coming.

• 42:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  You'd think, I would have seen it.

• 42:47Rick Rubin?

  If anyone would have seen it.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  If anyone would have seen it, yeah.

• 42:51Rick Rubin?

  You mentioned writing in a restaurant earlier. Is that a common practice?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:57Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about it.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  So, there are many different seasons in a day of writing. I like to get up early and, and get pages done. Like, when I'm, when I'm doing that, and I've kind of started the day out that way. And it's a very isolated way of working. I like to go to a restaurant and sit with hard copy. Usually in the morning, I'm working with a keyboard. But I like to have the, the pages in front of me and either make notes, free form, and

• 43:37Speaker 00

  I'll write fragments. It's, in, in that context, just having fragments is, is good. A few lines of dialogue here or there, or something else happens. It's kind of unspooling in my head, and I'm just writing down what... Is popping into my head and

• 43:57Rick Rubin?

  Think it has to do with there being other people in the space? Or what is it about it? That's different than writing at home?

• 44:04Speaker 00

  I don't feel so lonely. Well, a teacher that my son, who's the dyslexic one, really lit up when he found the right teachers. And they would tell him, you gotta take breaks. It's like you're part of the dyslexia is that your mind is going so fast. It's like somebody who stutters. They're trying to get so much out. It's locking up at the bottleneck. So be sure you get up and walk around. And so at a restaurant, that process happens automatically. And somebody comes up and says, want some more iced tea? How you doing? See people? I don't like it when it's when people are coming up pitching me story ideas and things like that. Then I then I start looking for

• 44:47Rick Rubin?

  Have you ever written anything based on someone else pitching you?

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Actually, I just this morning sold a project that happened because my youngest son was playing baseball. Coach pitched baseball, so it was a little beyond T-ball, but very young, maybe seven years old or something. And I was kind of dissatisfied with the whole program they were in. And I heard this, these kids laughing as they were playing. And I looked down at their coach was this big, strong guy throwing the ball to them. The kids were just cracking them just they were doing great and they were laughing and having this. And I walked up to him and said, dude, I introduced myself as I'm Randy. I want you to be the coach of my my son next year.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  And then I got a call from him like a week later. So can we have coffee? And I thought that he wanted to talk about me being the assistant coach or something, you know? And he had an idea about this football. He had played for the San Francisco 49ers and Bill Walsh. And and when he first started to tell me, I thought, oh, no. I just thought I was gonna have a friend and, you know, have a buddy and baseball coach and stuff like that. And he was pitching me a movie idea. But then I was a god if I went, dang, that is a really good idea.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  And they ended up writing it and we just sold it.

• 46:16Rick Rubin?

  That's great. How is writing a novel different than writing a script?

• 46:22Speaker 00

  It's fascinating for me. A novel is consumed within the mind of the reader. And in a certain way, that makes it a more intimate thing than any other art form I really know. And you only have the words to convey the story. Whereas with a screenplay, I actually find the screenplay is a more natural process for me. It's like when I started Braveheart. David Lean said, "A movie is really like three or four movie moments and all the rest is just stringing them together." Well, you know, that's kind of true and kind of not.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  But I knew I wanted to have a scene on the battlefield when the Scots are outnumbered and they're all about to run and William Wallace comes in and says something.

• 47:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  And I don't know what it was he was gonna say.

• 47:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  But that structure-

• 47:21Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember writing what he was gonna say?

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:24Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Well, I write toward an emotion. There's analysis, certainly. If you're used to the structure of songs and you go, "Well, I've got the verse and I've got the chorus and, well, I need to repeat, you know, the verse with different lyrics and chorus will be the same and now I need a middle eight." And, you know, you've got that kind of structure in your head. And I knew there would be a situation of, "We don't know who this guy is. Why are we gonna listen to you?" And that they're about to mutiny. And what would make me stay? You know, what do I most want to know? And I was informed really by two specific moments.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  One was just that I'd never really seen in anything else, which was, "All the rest of you can run. I will not run. I will stay here."

• 48:22Rick Rubin?

  Where'd that idea come from? That's a really cool idea.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Honestly, Rick, I don't know if it's... The Jesus story struck me as being true. Even if you don't understand who I am or what I'm doing, even if I sometimes don't understand who I am or what I'm doing, this is what I'm going to do. That to me went, "That's true." And there are things that... And I've had plenty of experiences in my life when I go, "This isn't me and I'm gonna walk away." A job, a relationship, whatever it is. Like, it's painful, it's hard, but you go... But the other things, you go, "This is where I will stand."

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. As long as I- It's commitment. It's commitment. It's commitment. And I've thought, "Well, I was fed that with my mother's milk." But also, if there are things that I was fed from birth that I looked at and go, "That's not for me," or "That's not who I am." And others went, "This is who I am." So I was stirred up by the thing, the stories of people who have drawn a line somewhere in the sand and said, "This is the hill I'll fight on." And I wanted William Wallace to get to there. I had seen this St. Crispin's Day speech of, uh...

• 49:56Speaker 00

  In Shakespeare, when he sort of says, "Men, generations from now, will think themselves beggars because they didn't get to be here on this day." How glorious this is. There was another thing in C.S. Lewis when, uh... The lion that he writes about in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia Stories. And he's hemmed up in a cave with a bear and a unicorn, are the only ones left of all the people that have followed him. And they're the last three survivors. And this massive army of tell-marines, they're called in the story, are there to kill him, but it's a cave and, uh... Because it's tight, like Thermopylae, they can't get at him. And the lion, the bear and the unicorn are just killing, you know, droves.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  So they send in a messenger and they say, "We don't want the bear and the unicorn." We just want the lion. Now, we'll let you guys live. We'll put chains on the bear and he'll dance in the circus and we'll cut the horn off the unicorn and he'll pull a cart for the rest of his life. But you get to live. But you gotta give us the lion. And the lion looks at his friends and says, what are you gonna do? And they say, of all the deaths, we could have chosen this as the one. Beautiful. That's great. It's like, I wanna be like, they may take our lives, they'll never take our freedom. And I, I mean, and that's where, like I say, every man dies, not every man really lives, came from too, because I thought, well, why ride in and put yourself in the

• 51:23Speaker 00

  hands of people that have already betrayed you? Yeah. And why wouldn't you just beg for mercy and live a little while longer?

• 51:35Rick Rubin?

  How are writing and directing different jobs?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  The big thing is that writing is the most solitary, intimate thing you can do. And directing is all about getting other people all to move in the same way. And directing is profoundly connecting with other artists who are themselves vulnerable and afraid at times, whether they are actors, composers, set directors. Everybody on the set has an artistic spirit. And I wanna both be artistically moving in the right direction, but also directing the entire experience.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  My cinematographer, Dean Simler, he was director of photography for Dances with Wolves. And he's an Aussie. And I never met an Aussie I didn't like. I mean, I never met one that I didn't like. And Dean is like, really artistic and really gritty. And he said that George Martin taught him that there's a circle of grace around the camera. And you wanna preserve that at all costs. Like, when you're there in that space, that's the crucible. And I feel that the director, more than anyone else, has to set the tone for that. It's fun, but it's like, this is sacred space.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  And of course, that doesn't mean that it's not dancing and joy. I've heard that Quentin Tarantino loves to play music.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Loudly as they're setting up shots, because he loves music so much and he wants to, and I love that. I've never been on one of his sets, but I love that and I love doing that with, versions of that with my group. But, but that, that to me is the essential difference is that you're creating everything that you can see alone onto the page and, and when you are directing, you've got to get everybody heart pulling together.

• 53:43Rick Rubin?

  When you're writing, do you picture it?

• 53:46Speaker 00

  I'm seeing it.

• 53:47Rick Rubin?

  You're seeing it?

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Uh huh. I'm in the scene.

• 53:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you hear the words?

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm in the scene myself.

• 53:56Rick Rubin?

  Are you playing a character in the scene?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Every character. Gabriel Byrne was on a talk show right before Man in the Iron Mask and I think it was, you know, it was Jay Leno and said, "Why did you choose this movie?" And Gabe said, "Well, I love the script and I, I think it's because Randall saw himself as every character, including the Queen."

• 54:25Speaker 00

  A real Irishman's wit, right? But he was right. It's like, you've got to stand in the position of every character.

• 54:33Rick Rubin?

  Would you say in some way, everything you write is biographical?

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yes. But I think you're also discovering, I think whatever rings in you, like that beautiful hummingbird guitar. When I was writing in Nashville, some of the old Nashville hands had this belief that a guitar had certain songs in it and when you'd gotten them out, you needed to give it to someone else. They might find some songs in it where you weren't going to.

• 55:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  And my thought about that was, it has a certain poetry and it, and when you hear, you hear an open E chord on that guitar that would sound different from some other guitar.

• 55:16Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  And that triggers.

• 55:17Rick Rubin?

  For sure.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  You go to a different place.

• 55:19Rick Rubin?

  For sure.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  And I, I think that.

• 55:21Rick Rubin?

  Like you hear different overtones and different harmonics from any instrument.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:26Rick Rubin?

  And that can inspire different ways to play with it.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. The smell of it.

• 55:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  The, whether they. You know, the strings are a little bit corroded. Are they're new and shiny. Both of them have a different magic to it.

• 55:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, place has an effect as well.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 55:45Rick Rubin?

  You know, I got to work at Abbey Road. And you walk in Abbey Road and you know, the Beatles recorded there. So it changes your feeling.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:57Rick Rubin?

  It gets very serious when you're there because you're getting to be in this place.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Rick, the last three days of filming, we were soldiers. My father came out for the filming. When we were on our way back from Scotland, when I'd seen the William Wallace story, stopped off to visit my parents and my father took me on a drive and said, this writing thing isn't working out for you and you've got a son on the way and you need to like man up and get mature and do something to feed your family. Having said that, nobody was prouder of me than my dad. He came out for the last three days of filming. They were the happiest days of his life.

• 56:37Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  He was 78 years old. He was retired as a salesman, but he went around and met everybody on the set. And he went back to Virginia and he had a heart attack. And they did open heart surgery and he got pneumonia. And I got the phone call to turn off the machines. And because and my dad had at least made the decision doable because he had said, you know, don't ever keep me alive by artificial means. But when the doctor said he's not going to get better this way. And we make that call and I got straight to the airport and get on a plane and land in Atlanta and change planes. And I'm in the air when the pilot comes on and says, there's been an incident at the World Trade Center and all traffic has been ordered.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  It was 9/11.

• 57:24Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  So I didn't make it to my father's bedside before he died. So we finally get the rest of the family out when they lifted the travel bans. And we have this funeral and I get back to LA and we're doing the, I go back to work right away because that's what he would want me to do. So we're doing the sound effects of the movie and the background voices, just the general chatter. And this Vietnamese guy who had played an enemy soldier was doing Vietnamese voices in this thing, this kind of sweetening they call it. And he comes up to me on a break, and this is my first day back after my father's funeral. And he says, in this broken English, he says, "Mr. Randall, I'm so sorry about your father."

• 58:09Speaker 00

  And I say, "Well, thank you. Let's get back to work." Because I don't want to get emotional. And he goes, "I'm so sorry." Let's just get back to work. And he goes, "No, listen to me." And I, "What?" And he says, "The last day on the set, your father came up and talked to me. And your father said to me..." "Where's your father?" And I said, "Well, my father died in Vietnam." And your father said to me, "Then I'll be your father."

• 58:36Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, you know, go on. Generally, when I tell the story, I say that I tell the guy, "Well, if you think you're in line for an inheritance, you got nothing." But of course, I didn't say that.

• 58:53Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I had to say that to get over the emotion. But a few days later, my editor-

• 58:59Rick Rubin?

  This is why you could never talk to anybody on the set.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right.

• 59:07Rick Rubin?

  It's so funny. It's exactly what you didn't want. I mean, it's a beautiful story and you will have it forever. But there is work to do.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  Yes. And I was not going to get much done after that.

• 59:19Rick Rubin?

  Oh, no. It's a disaster.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  So my editor says to me a few days later, "We need a requiem hymn for the end of the movie." And my composer, Nick Glennie Smith, had written this beautiful score. So we took a little piece of it, and I picked up a legal pad and in five minutes wrote three verses and never changed a word.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  And we recorded that at Abbey Road. We recorded this at- What's it called? Mansions of the Lord. Wow, great. Let's listen to it. And, yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing)

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing)

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing)

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing) (Singing)

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  (Singing) (Singing) (Singing)

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Beautiful. So George Harrison died the night before we recorded that. So when we walked into the studio at Nantucket Abbey Road, the whole way was covered in flowers and candles. Wow. So for me, it's a hymn, you know, Yeah. to my dad, but to everyone else. And we had just the music first. And I'm all choked up. I'm thinking, it's just me. But Nick had invited this German composer friend. And when that final swell, this guy stood up. And I heard him whisper, my God. I thought, maybe it's not just me.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  So we had London session singers and then went to West Point, recorded the West Point. And like, half a dozen of the people that sang on that died in combat in Iraq. Like, the West Point Glee Club is not for you to get out of. Yeah. They carried Ronald Reagan's body from the National Cathedral, singing that song. That was the... And do you know how that came to be? I don't. I own the copyright. So I got a call saying Nancy Reagan would like your permission to use Mansions of the Lord. Absolutely. And I was away at a speaking engagement in Chicago.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  And somebody said Reagan funeral's on now. And I ran to a TV. And they had Handel and like Beethoven and Mahk. And you. And, yeah, yeah. I called Nick Glenn. He said, Nick. And he said, and Nick's English. And he goes, well, you know, boy, it's something of an honor, but all the others are dead.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, but we're not, you know? And so it was an experience for me of you never know what will happen in all of the, all of the times of getting up at 4:30 in the morning and just writing, just grinding through and grinding, and it was that discipline. I did spend a time in Nashville where I quit my job, saved my money, I slept on the floor. I did nothing all day long, except writing, studying music theory, practicing guitar, practicing singing, practicing piano, going back and forth, all of it. And I just went crazy. I absolutely went nuts. Like, I was so depressed at the end of that. So like Jordan Peterson says, you find out what's too much.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  You find out that you need other people, you need, you need to get up and walk around, you need to get out.

• 1:04:55Rick Rubin?

  How important is music in movies?

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  I think it's the most important single element.

• 1:05:00Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  I do, I do. In fact, I think you could tell a whole story with just images and, and music. Now, of course, Disney, I think, tried that in Fantasia a bit, like, without a given narrative. And it was more about the beauty of the images rather than the emotional story. When I was a kid, my dad was always looking for a deal. And he bought a stereo and he bought with it a collection, like, the great works of music. And the 1812 Overture was there. And I would turn that thing on, I mean, I'm talking, I was eight years old or something, just full blast and just stand there and listen to it and move my arms and like I was directing it.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  But, but you can feel the battle and the rise and fall and the surge of all that. And you turn the, the music off in a movie and it is absolutely dead, not nearly the same.

• 1:05:56Rick Rubin?

  How did you decide to make a Vietnam movie? How did you come to it?

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  When Braveheart happened, it was kind of like getting shot out of a cannon. This friend of mine had, had told me, he was trying to help me get started in my career. He was a TV guy, but... He said, Randy, look, I know you're frustrated and you look at other people and you go, I think I'm writing better scripts than I'm reading from other people. And he said, it's kind of like those ball machines. If you go to a batting cage and a ball's in that rack and it just moves down just a little bit each time, but then it hits those spinning wheels and now you're going 90 miles an hour. And he said, I think that's going to be that way for you. Well, I'm sitting at home and I get a phone call from an executive at Warner Brothers who says, I nearly got fired over your movie.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  I go, why? Well, because Mel, he has an office at our studio and we're supposed to be feeding him material and getting him to do his movies at our studio. And Braveheart wasn't on our radar screen and it wasn't their fault. They had, they had never seen it or heard of it, just had gone through Becky's company, which is MGM at the time, and then it went to Paramount. I'm sitting there and I get this phone call and they say, Kevin Costner has now read Braveheart and says he wishes you would send it to him and he wants to talk to you. And can you fly over to Hawaii? He was shooting Waterworld.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  And I said, boy, I wish my father were here to hear this. I would love to fly to Hawaii to help Kevin, but I've got to fly to London to help Mel. You know, I'm like, man, I guess I'm in the movie business now. And they said, that's fine, that's fine. When you get back, we'll fly you to Hawaii. This is before Braveheart even came out? Came out, that's right. That's right, it was, it was in production at that point. So I'm gonna fly to Hawaii. I go to a bookstore to get some books to read on the plane and there was a cover called, We Were Soldiers Once and Young. And the title was so poetic and beautiful, that grabbed me.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  And it was a young lieutenant with a fixed bayonet, which in Vietnam, which was really rare to have a fixed bayonet and when you got an M16. It seems like an ancient device. Yes, yeah. That combination of.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Like up close and personal, as we would say, where the metal meets the meat. Wow. Like, man, I gotta read this. So I pick up the book. I have it in my bag. On the plane, I start reading it. The preface says, Hollywood has gotten the story of the Vietnam veteran wrong every damn time, putting the knives of twisted politics on the bones of our dead brothers. Wow, that's a book for you. I get off the plane. I go to a payphone. And I called my agent. I said, somebody has got to own the movie rights to this. You tell them I'll kill a relative to write this story. And he goes, I'll get, I'll get back to you. Two days later, he calls and says, they won't sell the movie rights.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  They're afraid that if they sell them, that they'll give them to somebody that will hone their twisted politics on the bones. They will not sell them. So I said, find a number. So I call the guy. I didn't get General Moore. I got Joe Galloway, the journalist. And I said, look, you've never heard of me. I've written a story called Braveheart. I'm gonna send you the script. You read that, and if you like it, call me. If you don't, no harm, no foul. Two days later, they call me. Let's talk. And they go, do you believe in heroes? Did you read? And so I said, look, I have the juice now, right now, the heat to call a studio and say,

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  buy this for me, and we'll make it. But if we do that, they will be in control. No matter what they say, they'll own it. If you let me buy it with my own money, I will pay you less than they would pay you upfront. But I'll make you a deal that in success, you'll make more money than you ever would have made with them. And the control. They can trust you, they can't trust them. Exactly. I said, if you don't like what I do, you'll know who to come shoot. Yeah, yeah. And they went, deal. Yeah. And, and then from that day on, they were just right in my corner. So. When Braveheart came out, how was it received?

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Funny thing Braveheart did in a day when when a movie might open at thirty or forty million dollars. It opened at like eight or maybe twelve. Didn't explode. Uh-uh. And mainly because of its running time. How was the press reaction to it? The initial reaction was they lumped it as an action movie. They they treated it like it was Lethal Weapon seven or something. Which it's not. And it was reviewed in Time or Newsweek, one of them had a review. They lumped it in with with like Die Hard Two under the heading It's Summer, Let the Mayhem Begin.

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  But it was then the audience reaction that started to cause, then the reviewers were going, no, you need to take a look at this movie. It has substance. But its initial thing was, oh, it's just hacking and stuff like that. And how long did it take to really get going? So they they released it and it was out for about three weeks and the studio pulled the release. They pulled it off the market. Why is that? Because they felt that it wasn't getting the traction that it ought to have. Yeah. They knew from the audience reactions and their own reactions that, you know, people were sitting out outside the theaters discussing it. Yeah. Women were gathered and like, I want a man like that.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  But it wasn't building in audience. They pulled it off. They pulled it off and they came out again with it. They thought, okay, we're at the wrong time. It's not a summer movie. It's a winter movie. It's a more thoughtful. So they came out again right around Thanksgiving. So how many months between the three weeks of then coming back out? Well, from from the end of May till till Thanksgiving. I never heard of that happening before. Is that a common practice? Uh, no, not common. And they they brought it out again in the winter and it. So they re-released the movie? Re-released it the second time and it did okay again. You know, one of the problems was, say you've got a thousand theaters. Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  And you've got a two-hour movie, then you can have four showings or even five a day. But with a, well, a three-hour movie. Then you're really getting two a day.

• 1:13:00Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  So we're only getting half the return.

• 1:13:03Rick Rubin?

  I see, for the same amount of time.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Same amount of time.

• 1:13:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, same number of days, only half as many screenings because the movie's twice as long.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:13:11Rick Rubin?

  I understand.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  Exactly, so.

• 1:13:13Rick Rubin?

  So it's tricky on the box office because it looks like you're doing half as good.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:18Rick Rubin?

  For the same number of people going to see the movie.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:13:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  Exactly right.

• 1:13:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  And the word of mouth was just phenomenal.

• 1:13:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  But they weren't, it wasn't reflecting in, in the number of screens in the box office that we're getting. So they came out with it a second time in the, the winter of 95. And then when it got all the nominations for awards, they released it again, the third time. So the total.

• 1:13:45Rick Rubin?

  I've never heard of anything like this before.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Hmm, true story.

• 1:13:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  The, the, the domestic box office was for Braveheart.

• 1:13:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Was around 50 or 60, it was not. The international was massive, like 300 or something.

• 1:14:02Rick Rubin?

  Wow, so how did it go from mediocre theatrical success to being such a culturally significant movie? And how did that happen?

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  My take on it is, and of course I'm biased, but is that it was the, the depth of its penetration into people watching. It wasn't like, I like this movie. It wasn't even like, I love this movie, it was like this.

• 1:14:33Rick Rubin?

  I feel this.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Feel this movie. And.

• 1:14:37Rick Rubin?

  How did Mel feel about it all?

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  He had given so much. I once met a woman that, I think it was Clint Eastwood's first wife.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  They had long since divorced. But I asked her about Clint's process and things like that. And she said, when he's directed and acted, that for the first month or so, when he comes home, he can barely speak. He's just so depleted. Too much. And Mel had just, he had given all of that. But I think he felt, he felt the wave of reaction happening. People were calling, like Ridley Scott, you know, people like that, that you, you know, you look up to and it's going, hey, man, this is a great movie. And I think he was starting to feel that.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  But we all were thinking the box office would be way bigger than we were seeing so far. So it took a while to get going and. And they didn't win Best Picture. Oh, yeah, yeah, won Best Picture. That's amazing. Yeah. Amazing, amazing story. And then the DVD, they were massive. Yeah. Do you write for a particular audience? Yeah, actually, I do. So I had an Uncle Lawton, they called him Uncle Toad. But he was a big, strong, handsome, intense guy. A lot of people were afraid of him, but he had this enormously soft heart.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  And I remember when I was in school and the first week I was in, at college, and I was getting to go to college when my parents had always dreamed of having an education, but hadn't been able to have one. So their dream was to save their money so my sister and I could go to college. And the first week I'm there, this guy in orientation said, your education is going to separate you from all the people back home. You know, they won't have the sophistication, they won't have the. And I remember thinking, what kind of education is that? You mean, maybe they don't use bigger words than they need to use.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  Maybe they don't make references to German philosophical theology. But that doesn't mean they don't know more. It doesn't mean they're not, and I'm going to write for them. For everybody. Yeah, that's right, it's for everybody. Yeah.

• 1:17:08Rick Rubin?

  How would you describe the part of you that's unchanging, that's always been there since childhood?

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  There's a way in which I feel I'm exactly the same person. I look out at the world and think I look to the world the way I've always been. Like when I look in a mirror and go, "You're older than..." My mother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. And one of my cousins told me that when my father first took her to a Wallace family reunion, and she was maybe 19, he said, "I saw your mother." And I said, "That's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." And it was really funny because my mother was really uncomfortable with being attractive.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  There'd been a family scandal where all the shame had been brought on the family by her grandmother, had her father out of wedlock. And she was shunned from the moment of her pregnancy reveal. She never went into public again. So now my mother comes along and she's just this extraordinary beauty and just wants to hide it in any way she can, wants to suppress it. You're not supposed to be magnetic and attractive, certainly not erotic. You know, those things are out of the question. That was in the water in which I swam. And I was never even aware of it, how puritanical my upbringing was.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  But even in that context, I was still me. The artist part of, "This is who I am. I'm not like anybody else. I'm not gonna have other people decide who I am for me." When I met Steve Cantle, he became my first mentor in writing. He said, "You don't let them grade your paper."

• 1:19:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Rick Rubin?

  Are you always writing, would you say?

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I don't think I'm never not writing. In fact, I always have multiple pens because they're like ammo. I got, I got friends in Mississippi that carry, always carry a couple of weapons and several clips of ammo. And I go, you know, isn't that like a lot of burden?

• 1:19:32Rick Rubin?

  Do you write longhand? Is that how you write?

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  Sometimes. I've got the pens so I can, I write on napkins. That's the greatest.

• 1:19:40Rick Rubin?

  It just happens when you're out in the world?

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like, you gotta get this down, gotta get this. And then with my phone, I use the voice memos.

• 1:19:48Rick Rubin?

  When you get something, would it be a line? Or will it be a story idea? What would be some of the things you might note down?

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  It's generally a situation, a scene, and that scene implies a whole story. And once I start with a scene, thinking about that, you know, like one of those sci-fi movies where the plants that eat the house, it just comes up and goes in that direction.

• 1:20:17Rick Rubin?

  Would you say everything you've written has started with a scene? Or is there a concept before a scene?

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  There's a concept, but the concept for me is emotional. So when I was a kid, growing up in church, we really sang. It was huge. Music was a bigger part than the sermons were. And I remember my childhood was both the just grittiest tent revival and real kind of high church, not like Episcopal, you know, hoity-toity high church, not to dump on Episcopalians. But we were informal, but we had stained glass windows in the church and an organ. And when we would be singing Bach and Beethoven and Handel, and the organ would be as loud as it could go

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  and the bass was just roaring and you could feel it in your chest. And everybody in the church is standing up singing, "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee," which is Beethoven's melody.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Man, and I would go, this is the feeling I want in this movie, for example. Like, I'm always trying to get to that kind of. Ecstatic. Exactly the word, ecstasy. You want to be singing well, but it's your voice is blended with so many others. It's not your voice, it's not about you. Yeah. That was union with God to me. And that's the feeling that I'm looking for in a movie when. I've had moments when I was praying. And I realized in the prayer that I had not written the words. That the prayer that was in me. Was the deepest part of my soul expressing itself.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  But it became a very like simple. It was a question, but not like asking for something. Like, what do you want me to do as a father? And air came into me. In Genesis 1:1, the whole like when God breathes into. Into it, it's spirit and breath are the same word. And the. And that happened to me. Without me thinking about it, I hadn't thought of that concept in like 30 years. But I had a.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Like God had breathed into me. It's one of the scariest and most ecstatic, kind of like.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Like, I never did heroin. But when I've heard the descriptions of it, the people say, well, you do it. You understand why people throw their lives away to get that again. Yeah. And they can never get that again. This is an out of body, or this is bigger than me, is a divine experience. Was it scary? In a way, in a way it was scary and in a way it wasn't. It was like. I've become fascinated with angels, the concept of angels. And the first thing they say is, don't be afraid. And that implies to me that meeting them is frightening. You know, your first experiences.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  And, and I've had those moments in this, maybe four times in my life, when I felt like I was in the presence of, of something divine. Now, it's not unlike holding your baby for the first time, or the thousandth time, and smelling their breath and feeling their warmth. And I feel then I'm in the presence of the divine. When, when I'm feeling real love, I, that is divinity to me. But this is like, something has connected me to the power of God. And you better take that really seriously.

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  It's like, I want this, but I don't feel like I can stay in this moment.

• 1:24:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  That's, it's, it's a mystery.

• 1:24:20Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the four times?

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me.

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  Okay. First time was, um, I was about a year into divorce. And I thought it was the, just the most devastating personal failure. I, I'd had other experiences. When I was 11 years old, my father had a nervous breakdown. And, and my father was the, the best man I ever knew. And I knew, so he always smelled like Old Spice. Always had a crisp shirt on, a botany 500 suit. His Oldsmobile was perfect, you know? And, and he knew the names of the guys that swept the floors, as well as the name of the president. He was that guy. And he loved everybody.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  And, um, he had a nervous breakdown, and that was terrifying.

• 1:25:12Rick Rubin?

  Do you know why he had a nervous breakdown?

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, at least my narrative of it. His father had died before he was born. And his mother was a widow, I think, before she even knew she was gonna be a mother.

• 1:25:25Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Rick Rubin?

  That's wild.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Yes. My father was born eight, like eight months and a week after his father died.

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  His father got typhoid fever. Wow. The medical practice of the time killed him. Wow. They gave him Ipecac to make him vomit. And he got so dehydrated, they had to stop. And he began to improve. And they said, he's improved enough to resume the treatment. And they killed him. Which says to me a lot about what we think we know. Yeah. You know, in any field. I don't care, science, religion, or anything. So my father grew up very much on his own. And in the depression, started working full time when he was 14. And he was so good at being a salesman because he could just connect with anybody. If we had my father here today, they could send him to, you know, like Osama bin Laden.

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

  And they would call up and say, we're sorry, we're done. Yeah. Okay, it's fine, just send Thurman over, we're all good. You know, I mean, he was, he was really amazing. Yeah. And his confidence was just impeccable. But he worked for a company called Curtis Candy Company, which was a, they made baby roosts and butter fingers. And he just rose and rose and rose in that. And then the company got sold to some sort of flippers. Harvard Business School guys that, okay, well, we'll increase the profitability by firing all the old guys. And my father was 38. And was making more money, you know, than most everybody else was because he was a great salesman.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Well, we'll replace him with a salary guy, well, blah, blah, blah. And he had never been fired from anything. Yeah. And he just destroyed him. I was with him, actually. The, the last sale he made for Curtis in 1961 was for $90,000, which was a tractor, trailer, truckload of candy. The next sale he made was for 90 cents. Wow. But he ended up rebuilding and becoming extremely successful. How old were you at that time? 11. Yeah. But I didn't have the personal guilt about, my guilt then was, I need to be the man of the family.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  I've tried to analyze this in light of my recent experience with feeling the responsibilities. Like my friend Buddy that said to me, you know, a relationship's two people. You can't take 100% of the responsibility, but I did. And my marriage had fallen apart. I would wake up every morning and pray to just get through the day without coming apart. And at the end of the day, if I, you know, I always got through the day. And, and I would think, well, I actually got to have faith today and courage. And I wouldn't have had to have it if it weren't for these challenges to that.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  So I was going through that and I, I was at a, a gathering of guys that were discussing a book. And I was talking with the guy who had written the book quoted Braveheart seven times. But he said in the book, William Wallace said this and William Wallace said that. So I went up to him afterwards and said, hey dude, I'm really flattered that you quote. But William Wallace never said any of that. But you never mentioned me.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I pointed it out to him. But, but he, he had given me some fabulous advice in that time. I said to him that, that in his book, he asserted that it's a man's duty to rescue the woman. If she is depressed or whatever else she is, that it's a man's duty to rescue her. And, and I had said to him, well, I'm divorced. And what I took from your book was that I was even more condemnation of my failure. Cause I should have, and he stopped and said, if you took that, I'm really sorry. Because like if you look in the Bible, King David is the greatest warrior in the Bible.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  But there are passages where David is hiding. He's maneuvering, he's making alliances like a soldier only knows to attack. But a warrior knows some hills can't be taken by frontal assault and you have to.

• 1:29:50Rick Rubin?

  So you're saying King David was more like Ric Flair?

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Nobody was like Ric Flair. David was good, but he was no Ric Flair.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:30:09Rick Rubin?

  Okay, so you're telling me the four, the four experiences.

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so that night, he, he had said in his lecture, "If you want to do something scary, go home, get on your knees and ask God to tell you what he thinks of you, and then listen." Now, I'd never heard anybody suggest something like that. And I've never thought of God as like the oracle of Delphi. But I thought I would do it. And I went home and I got down on my knees by myself and, and I thought, "Well, before I ask God that question, I'll warm up and say, 'What do you want me to do about Andrew, who is my oldest son? And he was about to go off to college.'" And immediately, I got an answer.

• 1:30:58Speaker 00

  And Rick, the answer, it's not that I heard it with my ears, but it was crystal clear, "Trust him." And it was so clear and powerful, I started to argue with it.

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  And really, I mean, it's like, it's ridiculous.

• 1:31:14Rick Rubin?

  That's really funny.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  And I'm sitting there on my knees going, "What do you mean, 'trust him'?"

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  And nobody trusts their son. And it's like, nobody has a more trustworthy son, and I trust him more than anybody. And I don't, "What do you mean, 'trust him'?" And then I thought, "Well, I sure am arguing, so I better pause for a moment." And then I thought, "I don't trust him." Because everything I say to him as he's getting ready to go off to college is, "Now, remember, now, watch out for, now, you know, you know, it'd be really good if you..." And all those questions are saying to my son, "I don't think you're ready."

• 1:31:57Speaker 00

  And what I need to say to him now is, I trust you, you got it.

• 1:32:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  And then I said, what about Cullen, who was about 12? I was like, include him. Include him, include him, what do you mean? And all of these things that have been going on, it's like, well, he's the baby of the family. We don't need to like, sit down and explain to him, like, oh yeah, we do. He knows more that's going on than anybody. So then I go, well, what do you think of me? And I get, I love you. And I bawled like a baby. And then I was sitting there, I'm like, that's what God is telling me. And then it was like, so like, God has come, but he hasn't told me what he wants me to do.

• 1:32:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  And I was telling a friend who's in Opus Dei, you know, like the ultra Catholic.

• 1:32:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Speaker 00

  And he's Italian, so as I'm describing, I'm thinking, and he's nodding his head. And I'm thinking, is he nodding because he understands the English? Because English isn't his first language, or just like, he's just nodding in sympathy? Or he's nodding because he understands the experience? And so I said, well, you know, I really feel like God was telling me, he's got something for me to do. But he hasn't told me what it is that he wants me to do. And this guy goes, oh, he will. Like, he was way down the line with having experiences like that himself.

• 1:33:27Rick Rubin?

  How old were you at the time of this story?

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  Probably 52.

• 1:33:32Rick Rubin?

  Okay, here's what's interesting to me. You're 52.

• 1:33:36Rick Rubin?

  You were raised in a religious family. You went to seminary.

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:43Rick Rubin?

  Your whole life, you were taught that God loves you. That God is love. And at 52, when God tells you he loves you, it makes you cry and you can't believe it. It's interesting, because it's not,

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:34:01Rick Rubin?

  It's not divergent from anything you've heard your whole life. There's no surprise in that message.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  And I had never thought of that. And as you say that, I wonder...

• 1:34:15Speaker 00

  I wonder about the dynamic there. Like, what is it that, along with being told that you're loved, you know, somebody can be saying, "I love you, I love you." Just like I could be saying to my son, "I trust you, I trust you." But the very way I'm doing it is that I don't. And if it's, well, but what I'm really, as a parent, is I'm afraid. So, I want you afraid. Be careful, those people out there, there are people out there that want to hurt you. And there are, I mean, there are. When I took my middle son, Cullen, to Scotland, right before he went off to college, and we wore kilts and ran around the Highlands with a bunch of the battle reenactors from Braveheart,

• 1:34:59Speaker 00

  many of whom are criminals, I mean, like, open criminals. And one of the things I wanted to say is, "But, Cullen, there are people who will want to knock your teeth out because you have teeth." These guys, that's exactly... This is, now, we're with them, and they would fight for us. Yes. But, but just, that's how they look, that's how they smell, that's how they talk, that's how they walk, you know? And they taught him a lot of lessons in that trip. But, is the spirit that you're getting the spirit of love, the spirit of faith, or the spirit of fear, or the spirit of, you know, distrust, which I suppose is the kind of fear? Or maybe it's intelligent to have it, I don't know. But, it is right.

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  It's like, I'd been told, and I certainly had the experience of being loved, but I think I didn't love myself was a big part of it. I felt torn apart in divorce, actually, because I felt that there was a part of me that went, "Randy, you love your family, you just don't know how to fix this." You even love your wife, you love, you love everybody involved. You don't know how to, is it better? Do you feel guilty? Oh, yeah. Yeah, like, I felt inadequate. I felt like I couldn't... I just couldn't find a way to fix it.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  And that if I stayed, I was gonna die. Wow. I mean, that's what I thought, yeah. It's heavy. And I even had those kinds of thoughts of, I'm not doing any good to anybody if I die. This won't help anybody. No matter who's mad, or who's hurt, or who's like, if I'm not here, that's not, that's not good. So it was dark, it was a dark time. And sort of being reminded that, just as I loved my sons, that I was saying those prayers because I loved my sons. Yeah. Then I was in that mode. And the next time was, I was having a movie come out.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  And every time I have a movie come out, there's this enormous fear that I'm going to be crushed by whatever happens, good or bad. That's interesting. That if it's a huge hit, then I can spiral into the wrong thing. Not like, I've never been afraid of drugs, or wild women. I have a certain fascination with certain things. But I've never, I've never had that as a feeling of liability, that I was gonna, I didn't even taste alcohol until I was in my mid twenties. But a huge success that then makes everyone say,

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  okay, that's what you do, do that for the rest of your life, would be artistic death for me. Yeah. And at the same time, the fear that, well, if everybody hates it, then, you know. You might not get to do it again. You may not get to do it again. And then how will I feel about myself? And all those things. So I say this prayer of, help me not make God out of what other people think. Beautiful. And that's my prayer. You please help me remember. How did you get to that?

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  Growing up in a real evangelical background, the Ten Commandments were big. And the very first one is, "You have no other gods before me, and love your neighbor as yourself." That's, Jesus said that. Those are the two, really, that you focus on. Down through the years, and all the various ways that I've looked into other people's understanding of God. You know, like, friends of mine, who are AA people, they go, well, one of the first things they tell you is, "There is a God, it's not you." And the surrender to that seemed crucial. But the perversion of that, you know, I thought, when I first moved to California, that you could tell a lot about a place

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  by who God is there. And my sense was, in Los Angeles, celebrity is God. It doesn't matter what you did to get your money or your fame. But if you're famous, then everybody's fascinated by you. In New York, it's money. You might have done some horrific things, but you got a pile of money, then you're the center of attention. The South, it's more like pride and honor, which isn't better. I mean, it's like, It's just different. Not better, but it's just different. But you make those things God instead of recognizing that there's a transcendence. Yeah. And accepting that, "I don't have all the answers." Gives me the sort of humility to go,

• 1:39:55Speaker 00

  "This other person is worth listening to and loving." So, Secretariat was about to come out. And the night before, I got down on my knees. And, bizarre story. I had just gotten out of the shower, and I was just getting ready to get in bed, but I was naked. But I got down on my knees, and it was odd to be, like, praying naked. But I was living in a place that nobody could see, my balcony, and it looked out over the ocean. And I walked out and thought, "I'm gonna pray outside." And instead of, like, lowering my head, I'm gonna look up at the stars. And I walked out, and I spread my arms, and I started to say the prayer.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  And suddenly it just went, huh. There it was again. And then I went, ah. This is God telling me. Not in like a bigger than a specific. Bigger than go to Memphis and, you know. Yeah, yeah. At this street corner. It wasn't that. It was a bigger thing that words couldn't even hold. Yeah. And that was God. And as soon as that thought went, then it happened again. Twice in the same like. Wow. And then it happened again recently. I have a window stained glass that I had made after I had the adventure with my hand.

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  I was, the doctor's gonna amputate my right hand. And, and I got to keep my hand. And, and involved in that whole thing was a dream. I'd gone to sleep thinking they were gonna cut my hand off the next morning. And I had this dream of the Wallace family crest, which is a hand holding a sword cocked to strike. A knight, you know, and under it is pro libertate, which is Latin for freedom, right? But in my dream, I dreamed I was the knight. And instead of holding a sword, it was a finger pointed toward heaven. And that was where they were gonna begin. It was that finger they were gonna start cutting off. Wow.

• 1:42:04Speaker 00

  And I woke up and went, God's not gonna take my hand. And they rolled me in the next morning and put me under. And when I came out, my sons were grinning. Look, just like you do right now, that my sons were smiling. And my hand was still there. Yeah. And so I decided, well, I'm gonna. I went and bought a Bozendorfer piano. So I'm gonna play piano every day instead of squeezing a rubber ball. Yeah. And I'm gonna get so that I can just dip it in and play Beethoven and do those like it. So every day, I, every day I played. But I had this stained glass window made. And in the middle is the Celtic cross that's over my parents' grave. I try to pray for gratitude.

• 1:42:48Speaker 00

  Because, you know, there's all that thing that you go, well, please watch over my sons. Please watch over this person. Please help this person heal and, or me and.

• 1:42:59Speaker 00

  But I don't want that to be my last thought of the day. I want my last thought of the day to be, "Thank you for all of the great things." In the morning, I'll pray for what? Here's what I hope, and help me find my way, what I can do to help these things happen. There was a church in Rome that was a pagan temple. When they converted to Christianity, they adapted some of their culture. And they didn't pray hunched over with their hands together. They prayed with their arms open out wide. And I'd begun to pray that way and found that I felt more vulnerable and more open. Very beautiful. Beautiful idea.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  And so I was on my knees, but like that. Hands wide. Hands wide. Beautiful. And I had like a vision of this terrifying being. I was in heaven, on my knees, in front of the throne of God. But this being was between me. I couldn't see beyond him. And I was surrounded by like warrior angels. And this guy felt like he was the king of the warrior angels. And he looked at me. I know this sounds like a... Sounds wild. Probably, I've never done mushrooms. No, I've never done... Sounds psychedelic. Psychedelics, but it really was like, there was so much like sober clarity to it.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  There was no intoxication feeling of this. And he looked at me. And he did a motion with his hand, and this thing shot out like a bolt of plasma lightning, about a foot long, it felt like. And I didn't see this with my eyes, right? I saw this between my ears. But that thing hit me, and I felt it hit me. I physically felt it hit me in the chest, this thing. And now, I know this sounds like wild ranting. I'm from Tennessee, okay? I go to Cracker Barrel. It's my favorite place. What do you think that was about? I think it was being told two things.

• 1:45:10Speaker 00

  It was, "You have a mission, and you've got to do it." But again, like, not what it's gonna be, but there was an identity piece of it. Like, "You have been knighted by the angels."

• 1:45:28Speaker 00

  As that comes out of my mouth, I haven't said this to anybody. Yeah. It sounds like the most grandiose, head-up-my-butt thing that a person could say. But it felt like that. That was the experience. That was the experience. Yeah. And I honestly do feel Yeah. that everybody has that. Yeah. That bolt of life that we are given, and it's our mission. And our mission isn't like limited by, you know, go to the mailbox and drop in a quarter or something. It's a bigger thing, like be alive, be fully alive. Yeah.

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

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