#393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn

“It's nice to be reminded that it's been hard for other people when they were getting things done that you admired, because it maybe gives you that extra little bit of determination or patience to persevere a little more." — Edward Norton Edward Norton (@EdwardNorton https://twitter.com/EdwardNorton) is one of the most celebrated actors of his generation. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards for his performances and has starred in, produced, written, or directed more than 30 films. His most recent film, Motherless Brooklyn https://www.motherlessbrooklynfilm.com/, which he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, will be released on November 1st. People mostly know Edward for his acting, but he has a substantial parallel career as an entrepreneur, investor, and activist in both technology and environmental sustainability ventures. In 2010 Norton co-founded and was chairman of CrowdRise https://www.crowdrise.com/, a charitable crowdfunding platform which raised more than $500M for U. S. nonprofit organizations before being acquired by GoFundMe https://www.gofundme.com/, the largest social fundraising platform in the world, which Norton now serves on the board of. He also co-founded EDO https://www.edo.com/, which applies advanced data science and machine learning to the analysis of audience engagement signals for the media and advertising industries. EDO's data and software are used by every major film studio in their media rotation planning, and virtually every major television network now includes EDO data alongside Nielsen data within their pricing metrics. He is the founding board president of the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust http://maasaiwilderness.org/, an award-winning Kenyan conservation and community development organization, and in 2010 he was appointed the first United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity https://www.cbd.int/ambassador/. Edward seems to do it all. In this wide-ranging conversation, we go deep into his creative process and creative struggles, both inside and outside of film. If you'd like more Edward after this episode, you can listen to my 2016 interview with him at tim.blog/edward https://tim.blog/2016/01/18/edward-norton-on-mastery-must-read-books-and-the-future-of-crowdfunding/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. And take my word for it and go see Motherless Brooklyn https://www.motherlessbrooklynfilm.com/ in theaters. It's absolutely outstanding. This episode is brought to you by Zapier http://zapier.com/tim. If you run your own business, think about all of the hours you spend moving information from one software program to another, or one window to another, one social media platform to another, copy and pasting, all because those things don't easily work together. With Zapier http://zapier.com/tim, now they do, automatically. Zapier http://zapier.com/tim is one of the best pieces of automation software I've ever come across, and it supports more than fifteen hundred business applications, so the possibilities are virtually endless. It is the easiest way to automate your work. Best of all, it's easy to build the exact solution you need in minutes, without writing code or asking a developer for help. Join more than 4.5 million people who are saving an average of 40 hours per month by using Zapier http://zapier.com/tim. Go to Zapier.com/tim http://zapier.com/tim and try Zapier http://zapier.com/tim for a free, 14-day trial. This episode is also brought to you by SuperFat Nut Butters. http://superfat.com/tim These little beauties are great. I’ve been using them as quick mini-breakfasts and on-the-go fuel for a few months now. They’re 200–300 calories each, depending on which ingredient cocktail you eat (MCT, protein, macadamia, caffeine, etc.); 3–5g of net carbs per pouch; keto- and Paleo-friendly; and easy to throw in a backpack or pocket. The first time I tried SuperFat http://superfat.com/tim, I finished the entire box in a few days, so watch your portion control. I suggest ordering the Variety Box http://superfat.com/tim and you can try all 5 SuperFat http://superfat.com/tim flavors in one box, and it has 2 pouches of each flavor. Get 15% off your order by going to SuperFat.com/tim http://superfat.com/tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would be seen appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Zapier. New sponsor, but not new to me as a service. We'll get to my personal story, but if you run your own business, think about all of the hours and hours you spend moving information from one software program to another, or one window to another, one social media platform to another, copy and pasting blah, blah, blah, all because those things don't easily work together, they're not connected. With Zapier, now they do, automatically. My team and I have been using Zapier for years, which helps us with tons of stuff, such as, just to take one example, connecting Facebook ad campaigns to our email platform. And you could also, as I do,

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  automate publishing things that you put on Instagram to other social media platforms, saving us hundreds of hours. My team has also raved about Zapier's support, this is super important to me, which in their words, quote, "is in a class of its own," end quote. And that is not paid placement. We test all of these things and have used Zapier as full paying retail customers. That is not because we got any type of freebie. So, there are tons of examples. Now, why are there tons of examples? There are tons of examples because Zapier supports more than 1,500 business applications and the possibilities are virtually endless for automating processes, for getting shit done.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  And you may know, if you read the 4-hour work week, that the third step is automation. In other words, not adding headcount to a messy process to fix problems, but automating as much as possible. You want to eliminate, then automate, and only then delegate. And Zapier is one of the best automating softwares, if you can use the plural, one of the best pieces of automation software I've ever come across. It is the easiest way to automate a ton of your work. So check it out. If you want to try it out or just learn more, go to zapier.com/tim. That's Z A P I E R dot com slash Tim.

• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  Connect the apps you use the most and let Zapier take it from there. You can do a million things. I'll give you one more example. You could, for instance, instantly engage with leads for your business, send them to a CRM or spreadsheet and then notify your team so they can act fast on every opportunity. And here's the really beautiful part and perhaps the gem to really highlight. It's easy to build an exact solution that you need in minutes without writing code or asking a developer for help. So as a non-technical person, you can piece these different programs together in a way that is customized for your needs and your business and what is important to you. So you can get the hell back to focusing on the stuff that you're good at.

• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:47Speaker 03

  Hey, just one thing, Tim. This is Michael from Zapier. It's pronounced Zapier, like happier. So that's zapier.com/tim.

• 4:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Super Fat Nut Butters. I've got two boxes of them actually sitting within 15 feet of me in a cabinet. These little beauties are great. I've been using them as quick mini breakfasts. That's one use. And as on-the-go fuel for a few months now. I was pretty slammed this afternoon. I had a Wi-Fi debacle and I was preparing to record a podcast. So I didn't have time to make something to eat or buy something to eat, but these saved my That's a great use case. They're 200 to 300 calories each, depending on which ingredient cocktail you eat, because there are a bunch of different types. MCT, meaning medium chain triglycerides, protein, macadamia, caffeine, etc. Three to five grams of net carbs per

• 4:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 5:23Tim Ferriss?

  to superfat.com/tim. That's superfat.com/tim for 15% off when you go to, one more time, superfat.com/tim.

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, and so on, that make them tick, make them good at what they do. My guest this episode is none other than Edward Norton. You can find him on Twitter, at Edward Norton. He is one of the most celebrated actors of his generation, and has starred in, produced, written, or directed more than 30 films. He's been nominated for three Academy Awards for his performances. His most recent film, Motherless Brooklyn, which he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, will be released

• 6:19Tim Ferriss?

  on November 1. I've seen it, and I do not say this lightly, it is spectacular. It's based on one of my favorite books, and we dig into that and get into a lot related to creative process, creative struggle, and so on in this episode. People mostly know Edward for his acting, but he has a substantial parallel career as an entrepreneur, investor, and activist in both technology and environmental sustainability ventures. He has hit a lot of home runs. We don't cover that in depth in this episode, but we talk about it here and there. As one example, in 2010 Norton co-founded and was chairman of CrowdRise, a charitable crowdfunding platform which raised more than $500 million for US nonprofit organizations,

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  before being acquired by GoFundMe, the largest social fundraising platform in the world, for which Norton now serves on the board. He also co-founded EDO, which applies advanced data science and machine learning to the analysis of audience engagement signals for the media and advertising industries. EDO's data and software are used by every major film studio in their media rotation planning, and virtually every major television network now includes EDO data alongside Nielsen data within their pricing metrics. He is the founding board member of the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, an award-winning Kenyan conservation and community development organization, and in 2010, he was appointed the first United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. Edward really seems to do it all, and in this wide-ranging conversation,

• 7:49Tim Ferriss?

  we explore how he does that, why he does that, why he feels able to change chapters in his life. We go deep into, as I mentioned, creative process, creative struggles, both inside and outside of film. If you'd like more Edward after this episode, you can listen to my 2016 interview with him, which is very, very different, at tim.blog/Edward, and take my word for it, go check out Motherless Brooklyn in theaters, if just for the music alone. It's absolutely outstanding. So with that said, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and, for me, super fun conversation with Edward Norton.

• 8:32Tim Ferriss?

  Edward, welcome back to the show.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Love being here. You know I love our conversations.

• 8:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, man, and we have a lot to talk about, and I want to start with going back in time to 1999. And this is an interview where I'm going to ask you questions, but I want to share some autobiographical sketch from my own life. So 1999, my mom recommends a book to me, and my mom is, I would go so far as to say a book snob in the best way possible. She recommends me perhaps one book every two or three years. And in the span of two weeks, my brother, who is... Exactly the same, recommends the same book, which was Motherless Brooklyn.

• 9:19Tim Ferriss?

  And it became a favorite book. I read it multiple times. And for ages, I thought to myself, why hasn't a movie, a film adaptation of some type been made? And I want to know how you came across Motherless Brooklyn in, I believe, 99 or thereabouts? And what impact it had, or why it grabbed your attention?

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Sure. So I was, you know, I was living in New York. I was like a New York actor. I started working in films. But I would always split back home to New York. And, you know, I came up with a lot of people in theater and people who were writers and people who were artists. And there's kind of that, the thing I love about New York is the density of it. You're, it's not like a company town like LA is.

• 10:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  Or a one. And I think, I was at a party in the Village and someone I knew who knew Jonathan Leatham. Got, we were talking and, and she said, you know, Jonathan Leatham? And I said, sure, sure. Yeah, he's that Brooklyn writer who, you know, did this and that. And she said, yeah, he's a friend of mine and, you know, he's got this new book coming out about a Tourette's detective who has obsessive compulsive disorder also. And, and is trying to solve the murder of his boss in Brooklyn. And I literally was like, stop, you had me at Tourette's.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  I was like, I literally said, Tourette's, I was into Tourette's detective. I'm, I'm, I'm salivating. I'm, I'm, I have to read it. And so I, I somehow got connected to Jonathan and I, I persuaded, I got the book in galley form. It hadn't been published yet. And, you know, revealing our age, I, it was, it was a Xerox. I had, I got a Xerox with a clip, a clip binder on it. And for those on the podcast who are Young nerdy tech geeks who don't know what Xerox is. Before PDF, you actually had to print something on a paper, on a copier.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  And so I had a paper bound Xeroxed copy of it, and I read it in one go. And, you know, it's funny, because I, when I really think about why did it grab me so much? It's very similar to the experience I had reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time. Lionel, the character in Motherless Brooklyn, has many of the same emotional hooks that I think Holden Caulfield does. By the end of page one, you're on his side, you know, you're sort of, because he's narrating

• 12:33Speaker 04

  his own story to you, because from the first sentence, he's telling you, "This is how my head works." And you can hear the calm, rational mind at the center of the story. When he describes this chaotic condition that he has, that he has to spend his life navigating, Jonathan Leatham, he pulls off the thing that we all try to do in books, in art, in music, which is, the end of page one, you're emotionally bought in, you're hooked, you relate to this character, you feel for him, you have empathy, but you're laughing, you're sympathetic, you're impressed.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  It's just like, he does, it's a zero to sixty emotional buy-in that's very, very rare. You know, you relate in the most reductive sense. And then from there, it becomes this study of the mind and how it works. And the fact that his condition is extreme, that he has the physical twitches of Tourette's, the mental...

• 13:46Speaker 04

  obsessive compulsive components of it, the vocalizations that are that he can't control, that are both hilarious and painful and awkward and make life difficult for him. We don't all, we don't all have Tourette's, but I think what Jonathan achieves is everybody sees themselves in it because we all are constantly in a conversation with our own minds. We all have a rational center that deals with our behavior and our noisy voices that tell us to do things we know we don't want to do. You know, we, we all relate to

• 14:26Speaker 04

  being essentially in an argument with ourself and with the impulses that we wish we could control better. So Tourette's is, we, Tourette's becomes this, this, it becomes this sort of he and Lionel, they become a proxy for us, you know, and, and our, our, the difficulty we have navigating ourselves. And that just nailed me. It just like, I was, I was completely entranced by it. And honestly, as an actor, I just was greedy. I was like, I want that gig. I want, I want the part. No, I want, I wanna, because, because, not because it

• 15:07Speaker 04

  was like, oh, this is instantly, you know, showy. It was more, this is just hard. How would you do this? You know, how do you, it presents all the mediest challenges for an actor. It's paradoxical. It's actually physically demanding. You have to see the humanity of the character underneath it. And it just was like, this would be a field day. I would really like to play the role.

• 15:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So let me hop in for a second here because I really want to underscore a few things that you said that struck me about the book and also about the film. And if, if I'm misquoting you here, I'm, I'm going to quote you quoting someone else. But in one, one of the interviews I read in prep for this, even though we know each other, I found you referencing a C.S. Lewis line from Shadowlands. We read to know we're not alone. And I think that, as you said, Lionel, on, on one hand, is such an unusual character, but on the other is very usual in that he represents this, this schism.

• 16:12Tim Ferriss?

  That we sometimes feel about our outer and inner worlds, or perhaps even dueling inner worlds. Right? And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give any spoilers in this, but he even references parts of himself as Bailey, right? He has

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which And that we, we kept in the film. It's one of the real, it's one of the, it's one of the details of the book that's really marvelous where the, his condition, the part of his head that has the inhibition, the lack of inhibition and the impulse control, you know, problems and literally fights, fights his, his conscious self, fights the attempts to restrain it and, and calls him Bailey. So he's, it's so, it's such a schism that, that

• 17:13Speaker 04

  when he yells sometimes, the voice in his head yells at him and names him Bailey. It's, it's, um, you think, you think about like the ways we talk in our head, like you think about, think about the number of times that you've said quietly in your head, "Oh, you're such a fucking idiot." Like why, you know, think about the critical voice in your head aimed at yourself. It, it's literally right out of, you know, and you being a meditator, the noisy mind, right? It's like the noisy mind literally given, given name, given form,

• 17:54Speaker 04

  given voice. It's like, it's not just that we can't stop our thoughts. It's that we actually have a piece of our head that criticizes the, the actions that another part of our head is, is, you know, implementing. It's, it's amazing. It's an amazing thing that we live with and that most people don't discuss as an openly or actively as a phenomenon, you know?

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's also it, meaning the film. I'll be honest. Initially, even though I know how skilled you are, I was, I was very nervous to see the advanced screening because

• 18:39Tim Ferriss?

  This book is so dear to me and it's on top of that in some ways a very hard film to pull off. And you not only pulled it off and we'll certainly spend some time on creative process, which I want to get to in a second, but you made some decisions that I think strengthened the, not just the main characters, but the sort of humanity and the drama and the tension and everything that goes into the storyline itself. So to zoom in on the creative process, which I really know very little about, I don't know the backstory, but if we look at 1999, then we jump forward 10 years, 2009, 10 additional

• 19:22Tim Ferriss?

  years, 2019, when we're recording this. When did this catch for you? When did it actually start to happen? Because you, I just want to point out to people, wrote, produced, directed and starred in this film. That's a lot of concentrated effort. So what did making this film look like?

• 19:49Speaker 04

  It went in phases and in some total, there's no question it's the most work I've ever put into a film.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  It's one of the deepest dives and longest climbs, whatever metaphor you want to use. I've worked on this one longer and deeper than any creative piece I've worked on.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  The initial hook, as I said, was character. I was then busy for a while. I had a lot of other projects that I knew were literally going to take me a couple of years before I had the bandwidth to really seriously contemplate it. But much like, you know, as a function of what we're discussing, the brain works on things. You're busy doing other things, but I was noodling on it. It was rattling around in my head. I would reread the book. I would think about the character. Even when I wasn't actively trying to write it, I even started to sort of like try to imagine the physicality of it and how do you take something that's an interior monologue

• 20:59Speaker 04

  in a book and reduce it down and select pieces of it and what are the best pieces of Lionel? And my brain was kind of cooking on that for years.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  But when I got around to saying to myself, alright, actually what happened was in about two thousand three, in two thousand two, sorry, I did a run of work. I did, um, I did a big film. I did Red Dragon with a bunch of great actors and then I did Spike Lee's The Twenty-Fifth Hour. And then I did a play in New York for the rest of the year. I did Lanford Wilson's Burn This. And it was such a, the whole, the year was, it was an amazing year. It was a, it was, it was a very notably vital and satisfying year of creative work

• 21:48Speaker 04

  for me. I worked with amazing people. I worked with heroes of mine like Spike Lee. I did, I did two films in a row with Phil Hoffman and, and then we did plays next door to each other and we had come up together and that was really gratifying. And I, I, uh, I, I kinda got to the end of that year and I felt something very rare for me, which I sort of felt satiated. I actually felt like, um, I, I'd spent the whole year working in a gear that I'd wanted to work in for a long time and I felt like I'd run a marathon very successfully.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  And it was sort of like, why run another five miles until it hurts? I feel good. I, what am I gonna do? Do I wanna just like, keep going until something goes badly, you know? And I kind of got this moment of clarity where I was like, I need to take a break. I really wanna take a substantial break. And in two thousand three, I just, I stopped working entirely and I focused on getting my pilot's license. And I, I did that for like six or seven months, just trained, did aviation training and, and got my pilot's license. And it was, it was great. It really cleared my head. It really, it emptied it out. And I sort of got to the end of that and I thought, I'm ready to work on Mother

• 23:10Speaker 04

  less Brooklyn. So I, I, I had this nice sort of clean slate kind of feeling. And when I sat down to look at it again, I realized. There were some issues with turning it into a film because it's this very interior monologue. The whole book is kind of this interior narration and it has a plot, but really it's like Lionel in his head.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Edward, could I ask you to pause for one second?

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:32Tim Ferriss?

  You taking that break, and we're going to come right back to where you left off, but I would imagine that there were people who said, this is not the time to take a break. You're red hot. This is when you should commit to A, B, C, D, or E. Perhaps not, but there are many people who fantasize about taking such a break, but never do. They can't shift out of sixth gear. Was that hard for you?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  It was a little bit. It was a little bit, but I I've had good examples in my life. My, you know, my dad is like an incredibly accomplished person in multiple dimensions, you know, he's a scholar and a marine veteran and a lawyer. He was a corporate litigator. He was a US attorney. He was, you know, federal prosecutor for Maryland. He was an environmental litigator. He was an environmental organization builder. He's worked at a private equity firm. It's like he's really, he's had a remarkably rich tapestry in his career. There's a connectivity through all of it. There's an intellectual connectivity. There's a

• 24:42Speaker 04

  a values, mission-driven kind of thread to everything he's done. But I've really watched my dad over the years

• 24:51Speaker 04

  very fearlessly pull the video game cartridge out and put another one in. He really had, you remember when we were kids and you had your Atari cartridges?

• 25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I remember for sure.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Like, am I gonna play tanks or am I gonna play like, you know, what was it? Combat? It was called Combat, right? Or are you, or are you gonna play Pong or whatever?

• 25:11Speaker 04

  He, he, I've seen him have what I would call the pleasures of staying very feeling.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Challenged, fresh, invigorated about what he was doing through phases of his adult life. And, and I kind of learned to view those changes as, as, not as risky, but as like refreshing, you know what I mean? Right. I, I saw, even as a kid, you absorb, you absorb when your parent is turned on by what they're doing, you know? And I, I, I literally remember the new spring in his step, his enthusiasm, him being charged up. And it, I think as you get older and you have kids yourself, you, you forget almost

• 26:05Speaker 04

  how important it is, how much a child perceives about whether their parents are happy, you know what I mean? Definitely. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but I, I had an awareness that my dad's happiness was often pegged to making, you know, bold shifts in the way he was spending his time. And I, I, I felt like I'm one of the luckiest people in the world because I get to work, I get to do, you know, work or make a livelihood out of something that is play for me. It's, it's, and the last thing I wanted to do when I kind of meditated on it was, why do I wanna, why do I wanna turn this into a career? You know what I mean?

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Why would I turn this into, um, uh, something where it's exhausting me or it's, um, you know, what am I, what am I chasing? Like if I'm satiated or if I've just achieved like the things I wanted to, what, what a waste it would be if I, if I, if I make myself like a careerist, copper top, you know what I mean? Right. And, and, uh,

• 27:23Speaker 04

  And what a waste if I don't seize while I'm thirty years old on the freedom to, you know, the freedom to, that comes with this gig, the freedom to like,

• 27:36Speaker 04

  uh, get a pilot's license, you know what I mean? And, uh, those were dreams I had too. I, I dreamed my whole life of getting my pilot's license and I was like, I've got the money now, I've got the time. What's my reason for not doing it? I don't have one. So, um, it,

• 27:53Speaker 04

  and then we get back to the voices in the head, because voices come in the head. Voices of insecurity, voices of competitiveness, voices of, um, aspiration, uh, ambition, maybe more than aspiration, like ambition to, for ongoing plaudits, affirmation, applause, you know, like the, the, the hunger for, for achievement. Um, it, they come in the head and not to mention that there's the voices from outside, but really the truth is like, the ones that master you are the ones inside.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  They're the ones that are saying like, you know, you're gonna, you know, you need to get more of this or, and, and I think, um, it comes, it comes in. But piloting was really good for me. It was really good to not, um, take a break and, and just kind of like, go on vacation or lounge around. Because I replaced the consumption in my work with like the consumption in learning. Like in, in my brain, piloting was like one of the hardest things I ever took on. You know, it was like, it made, it honestly made the work I'd been doing feel kind of like, play, play acting, which weirdly it is.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  It is, you know, like, it's like, oh, making up stories and playing dress up for a living. Or like hurling myself into the sky by myself in a plane with, you know, ultimate consequences to screwing it up. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, create, create, creative risk and risk of botching a landing are not, are not actually equivalent. And it's like a great perspective too. You know what I mean?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Because I've always found I get some of my my best sort of

• 29:54Speaker 04

  for me, like I get them. I think we talked about this the first time I did your show. I think we talked about like the things that are meditative that are not sitting with your legs crossed trying to clear your mind. You know what I mean?

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  We did because we were sitting on a pier looking at surfers and we're talking about the role that's played in your life.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  So pilot, you know, piloting is a great meditation for me. It absolutely eradicates everything but the present moment. It's very, very, very difficult to be out of the present moment. And there's a function in it that's really interesting, which is takeoff and landing in particular. I'm sure there's a metaphor in this somewhere. But taking off and landing are extremely, extremely focused things, even for a modern airline pilot in a plane that basically flies itself. You are seriously on deck when you're taking off and landing that plane. And I think that experience is so intense, it's almost like this, it almost does what sometimes it takes me 45 minutes of meditation to get anywhere near, which is it

• 31:00Speaker 04

  obliterates, atomizes distraction, right? Because you you must deal with that moment and in which there's very little margin for error if something goes wrong. And it sort of atomizes your distraction. Then you get yourself up into the sky and you're floating. And somehow that atomization sustains. I don't find myself stressing once I'm on autopilot and I'm floating along. I look down at the landscape going by. I think about it's real Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast, thinking slow. Like once I'm up in the air and I'm kind of ahead of the plane. I I get into a very slow, slow gear

• 31:44Speaker 04

  and a very meditative gear, just watching the landscape go by. And it's wonderful. It's like really, really, really wonderful for me. And I think

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Uh, it's, I get that surfing, I get that scuba diving, but it's amazing how quickly piloting kind of straightens you out, straightens your head out.

• 32:08Tim Ferriss?

  So you, you finish this incredibly productive sprint with acting. You take this sabbatical of sorts to focus on piloting, which sounds very therapeutic in holding you in the present tense for much of the practice. You come out with a clear mind and you take another look at Marley's Brooklyn and you're realizing there are some challenges. As you mentioned, one of them, translating an internal dialogue in words on a page into something cinematic.

• 32:48Tim Ferriss?

  What else, what else were you pondering, turning over in your head as you reexamined Marley's Brooklyn? Because it is not an easy book to turn into a film.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  No, um, sometimes I think people don't even realize the degree to which the sound mix and the music are make or break for a film. You can have a film that's cut, the same film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture with a bad sound mix will seem like a piece of shit. Like it, it really, it is astonishing how important that layer of varnish is on the whole thing. And you, you can't adapt a book into a film. A book is not a film. It's just not. It, it functions in the mind of the reader in a totally different way.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Because you are activating imagery in your head in a much, much more surreal way than when you're receiving the sensory, you know, being encompassed by me, by visual and sound in a film. And you have to, you have to, you can't think about, um, I think faithful adaptations almost never work. If you're trying to literally transliterate the book into a, a, a verbatim, as close to a verbatim thing, it, it, those are the worst film adaptations. The very best ones, I think, are literally like, they're like transposing a piano concerto for guitar. You know, you have to just completely change. The waveform of it.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  And my favorites are ones where, you know, like Out of Africa, which is a film by a truly great director, Sidney Pollack, with one of the great performances by an actress ever. And it really holds up. It really, really holds up when you watch it, not only technically, but also thematically in terms of being a film about loss and the desire to hold on to things and possess them and coming to an acceptance of loss and impermanence. It's a really, really, really beautiful film. And it's based on, in theory, Isaac Dinnison's memoirs, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. There's none of the narrative plot that's in the film is embedded within the book. It's her, those are memoirs.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  The whole romance, the things, these are all suppositional. They, they springboarded from the essence of her sort of spiritual observations and meditations on impermanence. And they created a story from whole cloth, you know? It, it, and that's why it's a great film. They understood what the essence was and they turned it into a narrative and cinematic experience that's totally its own thing. And Jonathan Lethem not only loves films and is very erudite, he, he really held, holds that belief that, that it's better to springboard and to create something new unto itself. So when I said to him, like, look,

• 35:50Speaker 04

  we've, I, I think you gotta deal with certain structural challenges in this. And one of them is that Motherless Brooklyn has a slightly surreal tone in the sense that it's about guys in the modern world who feel like they're living in a pocket of Brooklyn that has never moved from 1957. Um, and they speak and act like. Almost like Raymond Chandler's gumshoe detectives. But if you slap that onto the screen and have guys in fedoras talking that way with Priuses floating by, you are, you have, you have immediately put yourself in an ironic mode, right? You've, you, you're essentially saying, we're, we're being tongue in cheek here. Nothing needs to be taken seriously. And if you go in that gear, then Lionel doesn't have to be taken seriously either.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  And his Tourette's is now a gag, not a complex person. It's, it's a, it's a wink, wink kind of a gag because the rest of the thing is a wink, wink gag. And I didn't want to do Motherless Brooklyn like the Blues Brothers. You know what I mean? I didn't, which is a great movie. That's just, you know, not what I thought it, it had within it. I wanted to play Lionel straight and I wanted him to be a rich, complex, sometimes poignant and affecting and, um, you know, a, a human being whose loneliness is real, whose isolation is real, um, alongside his humor and stuff. And if you, if we played it ironically, that wasn't going to be there.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  And so I said to Jonathan, like, you know, in the book, people call him freak show. Would people really even do that in 1999? Uh, you know, what this feels like is maybe, maybe it, let's set it in the hard boiled world of the books you love, the films we love and, you know, and, and let it be, um, a 50s thing. And amazingly Jonathan was like, I dig that idea. You know, he wasn't, he, no, he really was. He wasn't like, for one second, he, I mean, think about that. You write a book, people say they love it. And then someone comes along and says, hey, um, what if we were to like transform it? Like literally set it in a different time and therefore have to come up with a different

• 38:01Speaker 04

  mystery plot? Because the book is about the Yakuza and the Japanese sea urchin trade and Zendos and all these things that are highly contemporary, even though there's an old school feeling to the noir sort of vernacular of it. And without, and he was like, I love it. You know, he's like, I love it. Like, let's treat him like Marlowe and send Lionel into another mystery. And I, and he was like, I get it. I, I, I think it's a cool idea. And it's, it's very, um, I can't really overstate how rare it is for someone to be that

• 38:36Speaker 04

  broad minded about their own piece of work, you know?

• 38:39Tim Ferriss?

  When did you have that conversation with him roughly? Was that?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, somewhere, somewhere like, almost like five years after he published the book.

• 38:47Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So this would have been after you've revisited it, after the piloting, kind of 2004, 2005 period?

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, and somewhere, honestly, somewhere in flying around over Southern California, kind of do things, I had this kind of clarity that like

• 39:06Speaker 04

  that this, that the way around what was feeling like a tone problem was just simply to set it in the 50s. And that, and once that

• 39:20Speaker 04

  once that thing sort of settled in me, and I knew Jonathan was okay with it, then something really interesting happened, which is something else that I had been chewing on for a long time, totally unrelated to Mother was Brooklyn, was my fascination with what happened in New York in the mid 50s. This kind of really dark part of New York's social history that I was really, really interested in. And in one person in particular, this guy named Robert Moses.

• 39:53Tim Ferriss?

  Robert Moses.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  And I, and I had always thought to myself, how do you approach that? How do you approach this? How do you approach the density of what was going on? It's, and I, and I had sometimes thought it's kind of like the way that Chinatown is about stealing LA being built on stolen water. I always thought like what happened in New York under Robert Moses is sort of its own original sin, it's dark history in the 20th century and, but yeah, it's too dense though. It's all this urban planning stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I had this moment where I suddenly went, that's what Lionel can be the conveyance into Lionel can.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  We can take Jonathan's phenomenal detective and we can send him in a movie, which has to be bigger, has to have bigger scope. We can send him into this, into this, he can become the conveyance into this very dense and complex thing that I was also interested in. And suddenly, suddenly I had this like, you know, this mashup, this, this idea of mashing up these two things.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  So Robert Moses, for people, we won't spend, we don't need to spend a ton of time on Robert Moses, but as I watched Brothers Brooklyn, I wondered, it had to be in a way, right? How could it not be a Robert Moses incarnate in this film, played by Alec Baldwin? And for those who might have some passing familiarity of the name, Robert Moses is the subject of a book called The Power Broker, also, very, very, very good book by Robert Caro. And

• 41:36Speaker 04

  There's a whole chapter on him too, in the, in the Burns documentary called New York. There's a, there's a big section, which was, that was my first encounter with the story of Moses, was in the documentary, New York. But, yeah, he was, and he was, he was titularly, he was the Parks Commissioner, but secretly, he was essentially Darth Vader of New York in the 20th century. He held an almost uncontested imperial power over New York City, above any mayor, any governor. He, he ran New York City like a, like an autocratic Caesar and made almost all of the

• 42:21Speaker 04

  significant decisions about how New York

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Evolved from being a 19th century city into being a modern city. He, the, the, the whole physical landscape of New York's transformation in that era was directed by him.

• 42:37Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking, speaking of directing, as I mentioned earlier, you, you wrote, produced, directed and starred in this film. Did you want to do from the outset, all of those things? Or was that a byproduct of challenges you ran into? Or is there some other origin story? I'm just wondering how it came together.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Well, it, no, directing, I wanted to, like I said, um, it, it, I'm not really totally joking. I was kind of, it was a greedy actor impulse to grab a great role. I really thought this is a really memorable character and it's a great challenge. It's everything I love to try to take on. And it was like, I just want to play this part. Then I did, I, I was turned on by the challenge of adapting it. And then I ran into, that went through this process that we've talked about. And when suddenly I kind of had this, what was for me, exciting idea about the mashup and I had Jonathan's hall pass to be that sort of freewheeling in it.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  I, I'd spent a lot of time then researching and working on how to make kind of a literary mashup, um, not between books, but really just of motherless Brooklyn, but conveying it into the sort of a literary version of this history. And, um, and once I was finished that, which took me a long time, like many, a number of years, because I went through writer's block and I, and I got hung up on the plotting and I got distracted by other projects. But when I finally got it done, it took a solid eight years, I would say, for me to get to where I was happy with it. Then I reached a point where

• 44:22Speaker 04

  I was in my own mind, gonna shop it around to directors that I admired. But someone, you know, did something good for me. The, a studio executive that I was friends with. Actually sat me down in a bar in New York on 12th Street and was like, dude, you need to direct this. And I was sort of like, oh, but the part is really challenging and, and, and he literally said to me, look, think about the movies that we came up on that mattered to us. Do the Right Thing. Reds, Warren Beatty's great film about American socialists. You know, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, like, he kept citing all these examples of like,

• 45:05Speaker 04

  sometimes an actor is really right for a role, it's really in their wheelhouse. And they've come up with a story and they just do it, you know, they, they take that big swing. And, and he was like, he kinda said to me like, what, you know, why wouldn't you do this? Like, why wouldn't you, you've, this mashup is yours. You don't wanna sit over someone's shoulder, you know? And he, he just was like, you can do this. And I kind of did have that moment where I went,

• 45:38Speaker 04

  you know, why, yeah, why wouldn't I? I do love those films. They have meant a lot to me. Like, some of, some of them were defining films for me. And it was sort of like,

• 45:49Speaker 04

  he urged me across the line into, into getting excited about just owning it, you know?

• 45:56Tim Ferriss?

  And when, if, if we're, I don't mean to obsess on the timeline, but I'm so curious to get an idea of the timeline, since this is such a longitudinal project, right? I mean, it's, so when, when did you have that meeting with this executive who gave you the talking to, related to directing the film, roughly?

• 46:17Speaker 04

  So, if I was...

• 46:19Tim Ferriss?

  Because normally, I started to jump in. But, but normally what happens to me, and I'm, I'm sure has happened to a lot of people, is they have this backburner set of projects. But by and large, in my case, I never come back to them. So I'm fascinated by someone as busy as you are, and certainly not just with film. You have, you have many, many hats that you wear, much like your dad, in a sense, very multifaceted. How this remained a project? Roughly, when did you have this conversation?

• 46:56Speaker 04

  I probably started, actually not probably, I started actively writing it the summer of 2003. And I wrote like 60 or 70 pages of what became like 150 page script. And they were good, like they were good, they were the beginning of the movie as it is now. And, um, and people really liked it, like they were like, this is really, really cool. Like, and then I got horribly blocked, I got, it wasn't like distractedness, I really,

• 47:24Speaker 04

  I had it framed out and I had the things, but I couldn't in my mind just sort of puzzle out a compelling way to get lost in the murk but emerge from it. You know what I mean?

• 47:37Tim Ferriss?

  I do, especially with this, if I could call it genre, right? Is the getting lost in the murk is

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 47:43Tim Ferriss?

  Important.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Absolutely, you know, you, you, anybody who watches Chinatown and tells me that the first time that they, they have any idea what's going on until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie is lying. You have no idea what's going on in that movie, zero. Um, in fact, I've tracked it, there's a very specific scene where he's in the car with Faye Dunaway, where he finally narrates his read of what he thinks is going on. And there's only about 20 minutes left in the movie. And by the way, he's wrong. He, he, he, he thinks that what's going on is all about the water. And of course it's about incest, right? Um, and, and that,

• 48:26Speaker 04

  you know with these films that it's not about comprehension, that getting lost in deep convolution is actually part of the point, which is, which is an important point, which is that it's hard to know what's taking place around you. It, it literally, existentially noir at its best is about how difficult it is to see where

• 48:50Speaker 04

  The dangers are around you and where power is and who's got the power. You know, that that's that's what they're thematically, I think, is their strength is they really do remind us there are things going on in the shadows that are that are antagonistic to us. And that if we don't figure out what's going on, damage is going to get done, you know. But but I I I wanted I wanted the puzzle to make sense. Even, you know, you have to get lost, but you have to know underneath it what's really going on

• 49:29Speaker 04

  so that you can emerge from it or bring people out of it in a way that is it all is satisfying. And it does make sense in the end, you know, to some degree. And so I got hung up and then I did that terrible thing, which is I put it in the drawer. Right to your point, I put it in the drawer and I was like, I just need a break. And then literally, uh,

• 49:52Speaker 04

  I got sent a really weird, cool script called Down in the Valley. And I decided I'm gonna do that and I'll do it quick. I was like, I'm gonna do that one really quick. It's a little independent film and do that one quick and then I'll come right back to this. Right. And then then I did The Illusionist. And then then a film I had been working on for years to pull together came together. The Painted Veil, Naomi Watts got free and she wanted to do it. And suddenly it was like, I'm making a film for six months in Prague. And then I'm making a film for six months in China. And time just starts to roll by and your mind gets further and further from the thing you're working on. And it just one thing after another kept coming in. And then that thing in the drawer that you haven't figured out

• 50:35Speaker 04

  becomes more and more and more of a block, you know, of lead. It's just like, it's not an active thing. And I think the same person who later helped me embrace that I should direct it at a certain point called me and was like, hey, There's other people who are interested in this, I think, maybe, you know, should we let someone else take a crack at it? And I don't even know if that was true. I have a feeling it might have just been sticking a fork in me, but it worked. Like, and actually, this friend of mine, he was the studio executive who, at that time, was running New Line. And he actually did something that I laugh at in retrospect, which is, he cited a specific

• 51:19Speaker 04

  director to me, who I think he knew the idea of giving up my project to that person specifically was gonna make my skin crawl, like, and, and he, and he just, whether it was conscious or not, he, he hit me with exactly the right piece of information for my resolve to get very, very strong again. And I, I took it out, and, and he, he did kind of put a deadline on me. He was like, "Look, you know, we, we've been sitting on this thing a long time, and this person wants to do it." And I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." You know, and he, and he was like, "How about, well, how about we just agree, how about

• 52:02Speaker 04

  we just agree, like, you'll get it done by Christmas, or we'll start having a real conversation about, like, letting someone else take a crack at it." And it was, it was great. It, I literally knuckled down, and I pulled it out, I looked at it, I talked to some other writers with some focus who I respect, puzzled it out, cracked it, and finished it really aggressively, really. I, I wrote, like, I wrote my college thesis. I wrote the large bulk of the rest of it in, like, two or three weeks of, like, long, deep nights of just powering it through, and then it was done.

• 52:42Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very, very helpful friend, the anonymous executive.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  No, it's not anonymous. Toby Emmer, he's the head of Warner Brothers now. He's, um...

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very clever, maybe accidentally, but very helpful.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Clever, helpful, but also, like, you know, Hollywood and the business of movies is sort of like... Inside baseball and honestly, I sometimes think it's probably very boring to most people. But I do think, I do think it's always good to highlight when, when there's exceptions to sort of the reductive cliche about something and people in this day and age are constantly talking about how studios, you know, it's impossible to get original adult stuff made and everything. But I, I did not, I've had this champion, Toby Emmerich's been this incredible stalwart champion of my project for over a decade, like a really long time, encouraging me, pushing me along, helping me actually like get through these mental block moments.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  And then when I actually got it done, starting to try to figure out with me how to get it made and he didn't have the collateral to get it made. And then we went through this next period, which was like five years of really struggling to, to, you know, it was like the producerial struggle, the writer's struggle was over, but the producerial struggle was at least five years of both of us hammering on it and trying every equation of casting and financing and everything to get it made and all, you know, thwarted throughout, we were constantly thwarted.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's dig into thwart for a second here because I would imagine that many people listening on some level are thinking, you're Edward frickin' Norton, like why on earth would you hit these roadblocks? So what, what were the types of feedback or the, the pushback that you experienced? And I'm not saying that I doubt you had it, I just think it'd be helpful and I'm curious to hear more about.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Honestly, I think no one can ever take for granted that someone should just hand you money to make a film. I never know, like I don't, it doesn't matter if you've been nominated for 10 Academy Awards or it, it, it doesn't matter, it's risky, it's risky. And when someone's coming at you with, I'm going to do a big scale 1950s period film.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  About like a dense, kind of the Chinatown like story about New York City and its urban development. Oh, and at the middle of it is a guy with Tourette's Syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder. It's sort of, you know, Rain Man meets Chinatown. People's eyes just, people's eyes start crossing and you go, okay, not Chinatown, LA Confidential. That one was much more accessible. It's, you know what it is? It's not Rain Man. He's, he's got full on autism. It's Forrest Gump meets LA Confidential. You start, you start going, it's not Rain Man meets Chinatown. That's too tough. It's Forrest Gump meets LA Confidential. The more accessible version of both things. But people's eyes are just like, you got

• 55:56Speaker 04

  your chocolate and my peanut butter, my peanut butter and your choc- they don't, they're like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, you know, it's really, you're, you're definitely like describing something. In the trade, it's like, to, to say that it's execution dependent is a, is a, is an understatement. Mostly people are like, you know, please bring us the next one. You know what I mean? Like, it's, and, and when you're saying to people, will you give us me tens of millions of dollars to make this? You, you can't like walk around in a huff like, how can this be so tough? Like, I, I understood why it was tough. I, I, I understood why it was, why it was tough. And also like,

• 56:39Speaker 04

  you know, I, I, the upsides of not pursuing, let's call it a careerist, you know, pursuing projects where my agenda was, will this be one of the biggest movies ever? Is that you can make a lot of really excellent films that you're proud of and that people end up not only loving, but seeing as maybe almost like essential zeitgeisty movies like Fight Club or 25th Hour or American Street X. But those, none of those movies were financially successful. So it's not like I was walking around like. You know, like, like some actor on a run of gigantic hits who's considered like,

• 57:23Speaker 04

  you know, oh, this guy's gonna open the movie at 20 million, so we'll do anything he wants to do. You know what I mean?

• 57:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  It's just not the same and you can't, unfortunately, you can't collateralize artistic credibility

• 57:41Speaker 04

  into any kind of a, you know, any, any number. You just can't. You can, you can do it in some measure. And if I'd been willing to make, if I'd been able to make Motherless Brooklyn the way I wanted to for 15 million bucks of budget, I could, I could have done it the next day. You know what I mean? But I needed slightly more than that. And so it was tricky. It was just tricky.

• 58:05Tim Ferriss?

  May, I want to continue on the, on the hunt for producers and, and production budget. But may I ask you a question about writing process?

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:17Tim Ferriss?

  So you pull out this dusty, bound pile of paper that's been sitting in your desk.

• 58:28Tim Ferriss?

  What does the first day of writing look like? I mean, do you just start spitting out anything that comes to mind in hopes that something good lands on the page? Or do you use a different strategy? I mean, I, as someone who's put stuff on the shelf and I, I find writing very, very difficult.

• 58:47Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 58:47Tim Ferriss?

  And so if I, if I let something sit for a long time, I might be able to go back and edit what I've done very quickly. But the thing that struck fear in my heart, that murky part that I couldn't quite find my way through, may have been turned into a mountain in the meantime. Right? Like it's, it's, I've developed all these stories around why it was hard, how hard it was. What did the first day or the first few days of working on that look like and feel like for you?

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Well, the really interesting thing was that when I read what I had written. I forgot some of what I had written and I liked it. Like I was reading it as if someone else had written it and it was making me laugh. You know, um, I was, I, I, I kind of had this reinvigoration of, of the pleasure of it. Ironically, because procrastination does a really weird thing to your head. You know, when you, when you push something off, it starts to become monolithic. You know, I, I don't know what that is, but it, it becomes monolithic and you, and then it just intensifies your desire to avoid it.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  Um, and it was fa- it was, it was fascinating to read it and find, and kind of have the sensation of like, this is, this is so much fun. Like this is such fun language, this character circle. Why the, what was I, why did I put the, you know, why did I give up on this? And then in a funny way, I went back to my cards. Cause my issue wasn't a character issue. It wasn't a, a, a language. It was just a plotting issue. And I looked at my cards.

• 1:00:25Tim Ferriss?

  Cards, you mean literally index cards for scenes?

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah. And I, and I sat down on a huge rug and I mapped them all out. And I kind of looked at the node that was like, this was the problem. And like I said, I, I had a couple of conversations. I brought some people in that I trust and I was like, really, I'm hung up on this whole thing over this. I did kind of almost just some Rubik's Cubing with some people and it was like, I was like, oh, wait a second. I'm overthinking this. This gets easily solved by just doing X, right? And then suddenly it was like, holy crap. Like that really wasn't that big a deal at all. I just needed, you know, I needed a few people in a room brainstorming. And I did it with, um, Brian Koppelman and David.

• 1:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Who were, you know, great pals, great writers.

• 1:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Wrote rounders, produced The Illusionist. And it was kind of like, it was kind of like, you know, I ran them through it. They're, they're obviously terrific on this stuff and. Really, they let me use them as a sounding board. I threw ideas around. I feel like I remember David Levine saying at some point, like, I said something and David Lee goes, I don't, wait, what's wrong with that? He was like, you just said it. Like, what's wrong with it? Like, what's wrong with that? That's great. You know, and I was kind of like, oh, is it, that's, you know, is it that simple? You know, and, and, and, and it was like, it was, they helped me, they helped me, you know, crack my own, my own blockage.

• 1:01:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, such good guys. Just to, just to take a second for that. They're, they're two really skilled and really, really just good human beings. Also co-creators, along with Andrew Russorkin of Billions.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Billions, yeah, yeah, that's their, their show. And they're, they're great. Those guys, um, they, uh, they're like, serious tradecraft pros, you know, they really are like, they, they, they're writers, um, in the old school mode, you know, they, and, and they were great, helped me. So, um, uh, they helped me plunge through it. And, uh, then I went and, like I said, I wrote the rest of it in kind of a, almost like a blitz. And, um, and, uh, it, it was great. You know, it's, the funny thing, like,

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  I was actually thinking about, as we've been talking about this, sometimes I think guys don't acknowledge, men especially, maybe women experience this too. I don't, I don't know. But I certainly see it in a lot of my guy friends, is like, it's so stupid to be competitive about some things. Um, but...

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  But in what we've been talking about, I can actually kind of recognize, if I'm honest, that two things happened. One is that when Toby at one point said to me, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna give someone else a crack at this," it really was actually like the flaring of a very like, you know, um, low, a very low kind of primitive, kind of competitive aggro sensation in me that galvanized me. You know, I kinda was like, "You're not giving it to that guy. No, no way. No way. Like, this is mine." And, and, and I'm gonna, like, give me a, you know, it was like, it did kind of push me, right? And that's not necessarily

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  like a quality, that, that, that's a quality I would say in general, that I try to de-emphasize or, or cultivate out of myself, like, like competitive, competitive, competitive attitude within creative work. It's really stupid and I think it can be really counterproductive. I also think like around the culture of movies with award shows and all this shit, there's so much absurd like, like construct of competitiveness that is beyond inauthentic to anything to do with this kind of work. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like,

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  it's even more inauthentic to creative work than it is in figure skating, you know, where it's like subjectively scoring a figure skating routine. It's like the idea that, the idea that, that the culture would, um, construct like a competitive matrix around, um, any kind of a creative form with awards and all this stuff is really like, sort of mortifying, you know, uh, in some ways. And I think, but at the same time, like, it, it galvanized me. And it's funny, because we were talking about, we were talking about flying.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  There's an interesting kind of component of that too, which is say like, oh, well, your insecurities come in, I'm not working and, you know, are people gonna forget about me? And just stupid stuff comes in your head. But there's an interesting thing about doing something like getting good at flying or getting good at surfing, which is like, it drops through you into this kind of confidence. And there's a component of that that's competitive too, because in a weird way, you go, in your head, as a guy, I think you sort of go, yeah, but I can do this. Right? It's like having a black belt. It's sort of like, it's like, you're listening to someone blather on about something and in the back of your head going, can you take off a plane and land it? You know what I mean? It's like, I'm serious.

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I get it. I get it. I totally get it.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  You know, again, not the highest order of motivation, but it, when you say like, a lot of people don't do that, or a lot of people wouldn't take that break, sometimes I think if what you're doing is you're sort of, I don't know, exercising your muscles or developing a musculature that you're proud of, right? If it's like, a component of yourself that you, it's almost like, you have a secret, you have some secret skill, or you have, I think, it's interesting the way that it, it's interesting the way that it, it dials down the volume on insecurities in general. You know what I mean?

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Yeah. And it, I mean, it really hinges, it seems to me, on the stories you tell yourself, which create the lenses of your reality in the sense that they mold your perception of what you're doing.

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And don't you, I mean, you've done, like, when you famously, like, with the, you know, when you like worked on kickboxing, you know what I mean?

• 1:07:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Or when you do any of the things you've done to sort of demonstrate that with, that you can do things within body transformation, or learning to speed read, or anything, right? Don't you on some net level come away with it, come away from it saying, you know? I have a capability now that that I carry within me, whether other people see it or not, that gives me like a kind of a confidence.

• 1:07:54Tim Ferriss?

  100%, 100%, which is why I often recommend to people, even if they never have the opportunity, hopefully never have the opportunity to use kickboxing or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or some martial art outside of a practice environment, that they should train because the way they will carry themselves through the world, male, female, doesn't matter, age, doesn't matter, will be different. And there will be a certain quiet confidence that I think can be built and added to with many different skills that demonstrate an ability, demonstrate to yourself an ability

• 1:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  to learn, be self-sufficient, survive, whatever it might be. So it makes perfect sense to me. And also, the motivation that you're talking about, or the motivations, be they good or bad, somewhere in between, putting aside the value judgment, they are, meaning they exist. And in, in the examples that you've, a few of the examples you've given, you've been able to utilize them, right? Harness them ultimately to, as one example, get the script done, right?

• 1:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  So it's, it's, it's, it's, I was, I was listening to someone not long ago talk about how they've shifted from looking at things on a value scale of good to bad as an experiment, to one of beautiful or not beautiful. Like, how can you take whatever this motivation is, whatever this opportunity is, and turn it into something beautiful? It doesn't mean you, you ignore morality or good or bad, but, but as a thought experiment, looking at things through that lens. So you're able to take what might be looked at as a base primitive urge, this drive, and transmute it into...

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oddly enough, I mean, at the end product, like something that looks very deeply at impulses and human nature.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. True. I also think, I don't know, there's frustration at not being able to achieve some goal is never pleasant, right? We don't associate it. It's just not a pleasant feeling because you sort of want what you want and especially if you think you've got, you know, high-minded or only positive motivations, you're sort of like, mm, it's frustrating not to get to do this.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  And with this project, I definitely, you know, there was a period where it was always hovering. It was, it had a kind of an albatross-y kind of effect on me in the sense that it was, I wanted to do it and I felt I had a good vision for it and that it could be unique. And actually like be the kind of hypnotic movie experience that really reminds people, this is why we go to movies, you know what I mean? And I really had all that conviction, but then I was, I was like bending my life. It was like, it was like this shadow force.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  It was like a dark matter force in my life because it had this gravitational pull that would, it would affect my decisions, you know? I would sort of go, well, you know, I could take another year off or you're at a point, you know, where you don't have kids and you're in a great new relationship and you say, oh, well, let's just take our surfboards and go. But it's like, oh, but this might, you know, I've got to keep pressing on this because it might happen this year. And it sort of, it throws like, like those old models of the universe where the black hole is, you know, taking the time-space fabric and bending it, you know? That's how this was for me.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  It was, it was like bending the space-time fabric of my life, even though it was not happening, right? And it, and it, and it, and it, and there's this point where you have to kind of keep reassessing. It's like...

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  How how long am I gonna like let this mirage? Is this a mirage or is it a thing that I just have to persevere? Um, and how long am I gonna chase the mirage? You know?

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  And and when you were shopping, I'm not sure if that's the right term, but when you were uh engaging in the producerial, is that the word?

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:52Tim Ferriss?

  Uh challenges and pursuing that. At that point, were you confident that you could get it made and that it was going to get made? Or was it more of a test run to see or a fishing trip to see what type of feedback you would get? How can, I guess, how, at that point, how convinced were you it would happen or how committed were you to sort of willing it to happen?

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  I I had many moments where I thought um this this is not gonna work out the way I want it to. I I just don't have, I don't have the cards to win this hand. I'm I'm I'm and I went through, I went through a couple things where I was like, well, maybe I will just direct this now and go to another actor, you know, who I think we could get this movie made instantly and I think would be really great. You you know, but that kind of broke my heart a little bit selfishly.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  I I I really felt connected to this character of Lionel and I could kind of see my way in into that, but I just I just couldn't bite the bullet and make those phone calls, you know? Um, I had a moment of uh, this all went on so long that, you know, Netflix became a a big force in the in the landscape of ways you could get this stuff done. And I could have walked over to those guys who I think are awesome and I think gotten this done in in probably one conversation. Um, and I didn't have. I wasn't negative on that. I, I, it was probably the thing I would have.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  But I, but I had a note, it was before they had really started making some commitments to putting things in the theater. Um, the way they did with Roma, the way they did, um, are doing with Noah Baumbach's terrific movie Marriage Story and others, you know, and I, and I, I didn't wanna get hung up on sort of the like, the, almost like the pretension of saying, I wanna see this in the theater, but I, I did, I just, I, I wasn't quite willing at that point to surrender to the idea of, of making it only for a streaming presentation. You know, like they did with Roma, I'd have done it in a heartbeat, you know, uh, like, and I think it's, I, I'm not one of the ones who's negative on,

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  um, the way they're approaching this stuff. I think it's really, I think there's a lot of really, really, um, new and diverse voices are getting a platform to tell stories because of their model, you know, um. Totally. I, but it was a timing thing and I, I felt very low about it at times. Yeah, very, very, um, not defeated, but just very discouraged and thought that it might be one of those things I just, I, I just had to sort of sigh and

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  make a big pivot on or let go of and

• 1:16:06Speaker 04

  then, um, a, a, a, you know, a weird set of things started becoming emergent to me post 2016. Toby Emrick became head of Warner and he said to me, like, look, I'm not gonna have this job and not make a couple of movies I would, I really wanna make. And it's Warner Brothers and we've gotta make those movies. That's, that's part of our tradition and yours is one of the ones I wanna get done and I'm gonna figure out the absolute best deal I can give you to get it done and you're gonna have to find some of the money or a lot of the money, but we're gonna, I will create a way that we can get this done. Um, which is amazing.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  That is amazing. No, no, no, his, his.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  There's a lot of people who have that job who don't have, who don't say, "Now that I've got this job, I'm not gonna tighten up." You know what I mean? "I'm not gonna play to be here forever." "I'm just, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the position to do some of the things that made me wanna get into this in the first place." And he did immediately. He did it with Bradley Cooper on Star is Born.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  And he did it with me. You know, he was like, um, he literally said like, "Part of the tradition at Warner Brothers is we make like, you know, auteur-driven stuff." And all Clint Eastwood's films were done there. And they made Ellie Confidential. And, you know, and, um, so that was a shift. And then also, I got Bruce Willis, um, uh, stepped in and stepped up for the movie. And that made a difference. And, um, I found, I called in a lot of chips and figured out some very clever ways to pull together the co-financing alongside Warner Brothers that we needed. And, and suddenly started to tumble.

• 1:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  I have to, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I have a follow-up question.

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  Post, post 2016, you've seen the film. And even though I had written it essentially the way it is by 2012, there was a lot about what changed after 2016 that suddenly, you know, Toby was ringing me up and saying, "Man, a lot of what is embedded in this script is, is staggeringly on point, um, right now in a way that it was not in 2014." And, um, and I think that, maybe that was part of why, when I was giving it to all these terrific actors and saying, "I don't have any money for this. I, I have to have everybody like, you know, defer fees and just work for love of the project."

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  But it felt toothy to people. It felt like of its moment more than it had a few years before. And, uh, and I think it, it exerted more of a gravitational pull on this incredible cast of actors. And that helped me get it made too.

• 1:19:02Tim Ferriss?

  You have an incredibly star-studded cast. You have in front of the camera, you also have, I did a...

• 1:19:11Tim Ferriss?

  A fair amount of research prior to our conversation. You also have a lot of talent behind the cameras and working on the film and other capacities who are involved. You talked about deferring fees or having actors willing to defer payment in some fashion. You used, I think, the phrase creative co-financing or found creative ways to co-financing. Something along those lines. Feel free to not answer if that's the best move, but could you give even a hint as to what that means?

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  You can never, you really can't hedge off the risk of an individual film. The only way you can do that is if like the way that Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum really brilliantly with Magic Mike realized like we can make this film for like under six million bucks and we can pre-sell the foreign for more than the budget. And then we can own it. You know what I mean? So like we can, we can start shooting the film knowing that we're in the black on it and therefore literally finance it ourselves and own it. That you can, you can hedge off, you can literally de-risk a film if you can

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  make it for less than what you can pre-sell the foreign on. That's the only way to, to literally hedge off all risk on a single film, right? Which is why like most co-financing companies are the ones with big bank roles like Legendary that can do big slate financing with the studio because you're, you're essentially playing the portfolio, right? And historically, studio returns have delivered a return, like a positive return, right? So if you're going to people and saying, hey, we put some money in my film, you can talk till you're blue in the face about why it's going to work, but the bottom line is

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  the numbers don't lie. You, you, you're taking just a massive singular risk if you invest in one film, right? But I, I did a deal with some of my co-financiers around.

• 1:21:25Speaker 04

  Basically, I had access to the secondary trading on a company, a technology company that I was an original investor in and strategic advisor to. And I had a fund, a little boutique fund that was doing secondary trading in that company. And I basically set up a situation where some of the investors in my film had been looking at acquiring that company through their private equity firm. And they couldn't, but I was able to essentially do a deal with where they could be.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  My LPs and buy a stake through secondary, a secondary deal in this company that they were very interested in. And we all felt that the likely returns on that were such a sure thing that they considered it. I basically told them, I'll get you access to this deal if you'll finance my film too. And so I set up like a pair trade. I set up sort of like a pair trade on my film and a position in this company.

• 1:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  This is also a great example of where swapping cartridges in the video game that is the timeline of your multifaceted career paid off in a really tangible way, right? Because you've been exercising other interests and developing other capabilities and knowledge in a seemingly completely unrelated sector that then allowed you, in some ways, to get done a project in what many people would view as your primary career over a period of 20 years to finally get it done. That's remarkable.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  No, there's no question that my kind of parallel life outside of my creative filmmaking life, this whole other dimension of my professional life that is, you know, is not a public facing component of my life.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  100% the that that ended up unlocking the way to to get this passion project done. There's no doubt about it.

• 1:24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:24:04Speaker 04

  And I think I can say that no film, no film has ever been financed off of the specific type of deal that we did for this one. It was a and I don't and I will never, it's not replicable either for me. It was a very, very, very unique situation. And I I wouldn't even want to go through the headache of trying to replicate what we did on this because I think it was a little bit like Alex Honnold. I felt like I was, I felt like I was going up a pitch without a rope and that if I didn't

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  get each and every handhold perfect, it was gonna come, it was gonna be a complete and utter, you know, it was gonna be a complete fail. Like, like, it was sort of like, I was either gonna get to the top or the whole thing was gonna crash and burn completely. There was no, there really was not.

• 1:25:13Tim Ferriss?

  An in-between.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, there really wasn't an in-between. It was like, it was like, and the bet paid off in every way. And and the beautiful thing about it was actually, in a funny way, the the alliances I formed with people to get this done are are thick now. You know, that's like, I really feel, I really feel like a deep kind of alliance with the people who helped me achieve this, this long-held dream. And it's been, I've been able to reciprocate. There have been ripple effects to finally getting it done that were, that were as, as meaningful as, as the thing itself, which is great.

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  How cool. The, I mean, the tour of duty that was put in to get it made is no joke. And you mentioned theatrical run and putting the film into theaters and

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  I could make an argument, and I texted you this right after I saw the film, that even if the projector ceased to work and one were only able to listen to the movie through a proper sound system, like some of the sound systems in theaters, that it would be worth much more than the cost of admission. Could you speak to the soundtrack and the music? And anything that you think makes it noteworthy? Because I am not an audiophile, I'm not a musician. I appreciate music, I enjoy it, but I don't know the first thing about music theory or sound quality or anything like that.

• 1:26:59Tim Ferriss?

  And yet, the audio experience was so different for this film compared to the last, let's just call it dozen films I've seen in theaters. Why is that?

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think that music and sound in many films is approached as what I would call

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  an emotional accelerator or just an emotional enhancement of what is already taking place within the text. So the moment is obviously dramatic and the music reflects that drama. It's violent and the music reflects the violence. It's sad and the music reflects the sadness, right? And sometimes you get what I would call a very reductive kind of mirroring effect. And what that does, I think, is it makes the music disappear, right? It makes the music become a pad of embellishment underneath the other aspects of the film

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  as opposed to like a unique element in its own right that is almost taking on a primary role in communicating emotion or character or narrative or whatever, right? And I think a lot of my favorite films have...

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  I think not even mine. Everybody's favorite films usually have music that's more transcendent than that. And I don't mean transcendent, literally, that is transcends the text. It's not, it's not solely there as kind of a subtle embellishment. It's, it's, it's kind of more boldly used as its, as its own primary piece of the experience of the hypnosis that the film's working on you. And I, I, you know, jazz was gonna be a part of this film because of the era. It was also, to me, if there's a, if there's a kind of music that's Touretteic,

• 1:29:15Speaker 04

  it's jazz in the era of Bob. It's true, it's true, yeah. It's completely a Touretteic type of music, not just in its like sort of explosive sort of, but because literally it's about taking melodic forms and twisting them round and round and round and doing variations on a melody, variations on a melody, variations on a melody. And, and so I knew, I knew I wanted that a little bit. And once, and on the jazz component of it, I, I went initially to basically a genius, Wynton Marsalis, who helped me curate and think through

• 1:29:56Speaker 04

  some of the key music that was being played in a club in the film. But I also wanted to weave in, I wanted to weave in, honestly, I don't know why I was so into mashups on this, mashups of sort of like, you know, a Tourette, a Tourette character with a old fashioned noir. I wanted to mash up sort of jazz with Radiohead in a way, the things I love. And I got Tom York to write a beautiful song for the film that we, that we work into the film, not only in his performance of it,

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  but also in a 50s style Miles Davis-like arrangement of it. And again, it was one of those things that a lot of people kind of looked at me a little bit cross-eyed. They were like, this, you can't, you know, it's gonna be, it's, it's gonna feel weird to bring his voicing into a film in that era or to try to bring a modernist sensibility.

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  Of of dissonance and electronic kind of components into a jazz score. But I didn't think that was true because I I knew that Tom really like has an appreciation of jazz, especially like Charles Mingus and other jazz artists who explored the kind of dissonance that I think Tom has explored in his own music on records like Kid A and Amnesiac and his own solo stuff. And I I knew there was more synergy than people were recognizing on paper. And I thought we can do something really interesting mashing these things up. And and we did. And I think

• 1:31:43Speaker 04

  this this trifecta of Tom and Wynton Marsalis and this incredible, incredible young composer in London named Daniel Pemberton. And everybody's been reacting to it. And I I agree with you that I've been working on this for like a number of years. And I am still not tired of listening to the music on the film. I I have the the soundtrack. It actually the soundtrack just came out this past Friday. We released the soundtrack and the score last week on the streaming services.

• 1:32:14Tim Ferriss?

  Smart.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  They are beautiful. They are. They are just they you can listen to them without having seen a frame of the film. And it is really, really beautiful stuff. Really beautiful stuff.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  Kudos for the dance scene as well. I we don't have to give any spoilers, but what a what a fantastic, fantastic scene. People who watch it will know what I'm referring to. And I want to hop to a reference to I dare call it a review, but I don't think review is quite the right word. So I've had Ken Burns on this podcast. He's one of the people who don't recognize the names or the name, one of the most legendary, if not the most legendary, well respected documentarian of

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  Ever possibly in the United States. It means just a prolific, prodigious talent. And he wrote a piece-

• 1:33:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I would say, I would say he bent the genre. I'd say there's a, there's a, he redefined the genre. I think there was never, there was never long form. You know, you could even argue that the whole, the whole embrace of long form storytelling that's now ubiquitous on, that what we call binge TV watching, started with the Civil War. You know what I mean? Ken's film, The Civil War, was the most audacious long-form film in American history at that time. And, and he basically said, he was one of the first people to say, "People will not only sit for this, they will devour it.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  They want rich, nuanced, long stories about these seminal events in our history that are still defining who we are." You know, and, and he re, he reinvigorated, reshaped the entire form of, of not just documentary, but I literally think of filmed storytelling.

• 1:34:14Tim Ferriss?

  He did. He has, he has, and I'll, I'll probably get some of these numbers wrong, but since, since we're just doing a quick deep dive on Ken, there are, there are film effects named after Ken Burns, mostly related to his treatment of still photographs, with, embedded within and named after him in some of those popular software programs currently being used. And the Civil War, one must keep in mind, was on broadcast television. And it was somewhere between 14 and 20 hours of total content. And at the time, I want to say within a year or so, between 30 and 40 million people-

• 1:34:54Tim Ferriss?

  Had watched The Civil War. I mean, and if you just let that sink in for a second, considering that it's appointment viewing. I mean, it's, it's absolutely incredible. So he writes this piece on Medium, which I, which I only very recently read, and I'm gonna read the last paragraph. I mean, it's, it's, it's absolutely worth reading, and I'll, I'll link to it in the show notes for people at tim.blog/podcast, and you can find Edward. Just search Norton or Edward Norton, and then we'll have a link to this. But the last paragraph is, is one that really strikes me. So, "If a lonely orphan, burdened by society's heartless response to his Tourette's Syndrome, can rise above his daily struggles

• 1:35:36Tim Ferriss?

  and battle against jaded Masters of the Universe types, then what excuse do the rest of us have for our own apathy? Motherless Brooklyn answers with a resounding 'none'!" Exclamation point. That's a hell of an ending to a hell of a piece about the film, about you, about society also. We could talk about that, but the, the question I'd love to hear your thoughts on eventually is, what would you hope this film to do? What, what effect, if any, do you want it to have on people? Or the, the sort of larger, larger picture, if any? Just I'm curious what, what you'd like the impact to be on individuals who watch it or otherwise?

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  Well, I think to stick with Ken for, I mean, Ken's, Ken's affirmation of the film was just like, it was about as meaningful a, a compliment as I've ever gotten on my own work. It, it, it's like he's, he's, he's one of the Druids in, in my...

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  You know, in my matrix of people who have really mattered in filmmaking, he's one of the giants and he also in particular, he has clearly got this unparalleled commitment to dissecting kind of the American character. You know, he really, he's committed his whole creative career to trying to understand who we are through the past. And it's, I can't, you know, I can't overstate my admiration for the work he's done. So it's to have him kind of actually take the time to write this piece that he wrote

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  about the film was, you know, I had tears in my eyes when I read it the first time.

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  Can I, I'll just pause for a quick second, I'm sorry, because people may not realize just how effusive and direct his commentary is in this piece. I've never seen anything like it. So I'll just give one more quote, which is, dot, dot, dot, so I'm not going to read the entire paragraph, but "an instantly classic lead character and a career-best performance by one of our finest actors, scene after scene of memorably smart and funny dialogue, delivered by a brilliant ensemble cast, gripping action with a gorgeous jazz score that's the best I've heard in years. It's nothing less than a modern masterpiece." I mean, how did you, I know you just said it, it could bring a tear to your eye, but

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  like, how did you feel after 20 years of hoping to make this, to read something like that from none other than the legendary Ken Burns? I mean, what happened? Were you dumbstruck? Were you?

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  I mean, it's a funny thing, when you finish a thing, you go through, you go through these...

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  You start to sort of amass data points on how is it actually landing, you know, and you show it to people you respect and you show it to some friends and you, you know, you, I was starting to get a happy sense of slow, you know, confidence that it was working as a film, that it was doing what I wanted it to do, and that people were at least engaged with the character in some measure of the way that I had been engaged with him, right?

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  I think my first, my very, very, very, very first thing that I really was holding my breath on was, in a way, did I do Lionel justice? You know, did I do Lethem's great character, a basic honorable, you know, reinterpretation? And that seemed to me to be working. And Jonathan, I was very, very nervous showing the film to Jonathan, and when he was really exuberant about it, that set me into what I'd call a kind of happy relief.

• 1:39:59Speaker 04

  But I think that what Ken gets at, that's, he gets at a deeper level of satisfaction is that he, it's more what you read in the beginning. At a certain point, you kind of, there's the, there's the, there's the hope that you can craft something in a way that works a kind of magic on people just as a, as a piece of cinema, whatever. I think that might... The things that have meant the most to me as an audience member were things that had a transparency to them where I where you could feel you felt like it was really hitting the nerve of your own experience

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  or even better, the collective experience, you know, so for me, like, do the Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing had a had a seismic impact on me. It was this guy writing and directing and starring in his own film about his own neighborhood. Um, and it was wildly entertaining. It was visually original and dynamic and then it but then it was about America. It was it was about the toughest, thorniest questions about like race and and how we deal with each other and what's the correct response to the tensions that we feel

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  about living all together and it was just so, so rich, sophisticated. And most importantly, it it put it so squarely in the audience's lap. It didn't give a cheap homily at the end. It didn't give a cheap redemptive reassurance in the end. It it basically like insisted that you deal with with the question yourself, you know, and I think a lot of us, it changed almost like the aspirational goal for like what you're going for. Um, what you can do with a movie and on some level

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  the thing I've had the most ambition to do is is find things that that in some way or another um instigate that same kind of like um activation, you know, in

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  We get so much stuff that's essentially engineered to make us passive. Like, there's just so much in the culture that literally wants us to be a passive recipient of downloaded, um, cheap nutrition, mostly, I think, um, trying to put us in a mode where we're inclined to buy shit, you know what I mean? I think that, um, and I think, um, the stuff that activates people, the stuff that really gets them engaged is, is, is rare, and it's really cool when you feel it, when you, when you have that sensation that reminds you like, that you can get actually provoked emotionally

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  or provoked ethically or provoked in term, as a citizen, you know, it's, that's pretty cool. And I think, it doesn't mean that it's gotta be, um, you know, um, academic or intellectual or that, that it's gonna be, um, I don't know what the right word is, a, a screed or a, um, it, it can be art. I mean, it's like Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan doesn't explain to you, he refused to explain to you what a lot of what he did was about, but you knew, you know, you knew, you know, people in his generation, they knew what he was writing about, and they knew what he was getting at, and he didn't have to say it, and it galvanized people, you know, it

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  really galvanized people to, to participate, um, in, in their generations and, um, causes and all of it. And I think in some measure, that's the highest aspiration. It's, it's the, if you can, if you can get people to think about, um, their own participation in the world around them, that's pretty fantastic.

• 1:44:15Tim Ferriss?

  I, I think you nailed it, man. I, I, I sent you a message right after walking out of the theater. I saw it here in Austin at the Violet Crown, really nice, small theater, fantastic sound, good luminosity, which is a whole separate conversation, but they, they project properly. And it really does, it brings up a lot and it communicates a lot without doing it in a heavy-handed, two-on-the-nose, literal, prescriptive way. And it, as, as you said, doesn't offer...

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Neat, pithy, unrealistic, simple solutions to complex situations. But it, in not doing that, in presenting the story and the characters and the universal struggles and challenges and desires in a very artful, powerful way, I think, does a much greater service. It's a fun watch, but it's also a meaningful watch, and that's, that's really hard to do.

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  Thanks. I mean, I, it's funny, if I, you know, there's, there's the poet Rilke's, you know, who's, I love his poetry and his work, but there's that famous collection of letters that he wrote to a young poet. There's a bit in it that I think about a lot, where he kind of says, "Ten years is nothing to an artist. Gestation is everything." And it's kind of one of those things that you put over your desk when you're in college, you know, and you, because it just sounds, it, it's sexy to think that you know what it means, in a weird way. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:45:59Tim Ferriss?

  I totally do.

• 1:46:00Speaker 04

  You're sort of, it's the kind of thing you look, you, I latched on to when I was young, because I, you know, you imagine yourself with that, the romantic struggle of it, but then the reality of it is, is not so pleasant, sometimes, you know what I mean? But I think that, for me, the, the gestation on this affected what I wanted to say and my capacity to even understand what I wanted to say a lot. I think if I had been able to make this in 2003, a whole bunch of things wouldn't have happened. I think I would have, at that time in my life, sort of...

• 1:46:42Speaker 04

  Had more romance for the idea of like the cynicism that's in the noir genre, right? I think I might have embraced in an almost like showy way that I could be as dark and cynical as any noir movie before, you know? At my age, the phase of life I'm in with what I see going on in the country now, I really felt differently by the time I made this film. Like, I did not want Faye Dunaway to end up with a bullet in the eye and the detective saying, "Do as little as possible," because I think that is not what this country needs right now.

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  And I am not super keen on, you know, things that are artistically rich but ultimately really nihilistic. Like, I don't think we need nihilism romanced right now at all. I think we've got nihilistic, we've got nihilists walking into classrooms with AR-15s and blowing kids away, like, way, way, way too often to be casually putting a sexy stamp on the idea of nihilism. And I think, and I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have felt that strongly about that if I had made this 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago.

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  You know, so it would have changed what Ken wrote, what Ken wrote about this and the sort of propulsive, you know, message of it, or I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have been the person, you know, trying to put that message across if I'd made this before. And, um, and so I'm glad, in a way, like, I'm, I really am genuinely glad that it took a long time because I think, I feel more spiritually determined that it goes in the direction it goes in at the end, instead of into what I'd call, like, something that's sexy. It's funny, because Fight Club, some people say Fight Club is nihilistic, and a lot of people say that, but I never felt that about that movie.

• 1:48:45Speaker 04

  I always felt one of the things I liked about it was that Fincher, for all his, you know, for all his crusty exterior, like, that's very much about what we're talking about. And I think it's about a person who wrote, goes into a romance with a nihilistic thing, but absolutely comes out of it. You know, like, absolutely recognizes the destructive, the destructive freight train that he's set in motion and moves to derail it. And moves to grab hands with a woman and say like no to that and yes to linking up with another human being and making a connection, you know what I mean?

• 1:49:26Speaker 04

  And I think the violence in that film is, to reduce the film's message to the exploration of nihilism is a pretty weak sauce read of it, in my view. I think the message of evolution and growth in it is there. And I kind of feel that way about this. I think that this, making Mother's Brooklyn Now, it's got more of what I'd want to say as a father even in it than I would have been capable of earlier. I also couldn't have made this movie with the budget that I had and on the schedule that I had to make it.

• 1:50:10Speaker 04

  If I hadn't worked with Spike Lee and Wes Anderson and Alejandro Yoridu, I wouldn't have had the chops to do it. Those guys made me realize how much you, within limitations. And I think marinating in their work, with them, had a really, really big impact on my capacity to do this, logistically.

• 1:50:35Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Kudos to you, man. It's a great film. And I wholeheartedly urge everyone to check it out. And I do not take saying that lightly, because I recognize one careless recommendation and people are like, fuck that Tim Ferriss. So...

• 1:50:58Speaker 04

  Really interesting in talking about personal self-transformation. As an artistic benchmark, we don't trust him ever again.

• 1:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, yep, exactly right. But I do feel comfortable recommending this. It's great. And see it in the theater. That's definitely a recommendation. It'll be great when it comes out on other platforms, but it's really one of those films you want to see in a proper environment. And we have been talking for a while. I know you're a busy man these days. And I think this is a good place to wrap up, but people can say hello on Twitter at Edward Norton, Instagram, Edward Norton Official, Facebook Official Edward Norton. I'll link to all these in the show notes. Everything we talked about, I'll link to in the show notes, per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. But Edward, is there anything else you'd like

• 1:51:50Tim Ferriss?

  to say? Any parting comments, suggestions, anything else that I'm missing?

• 1:51:55Speaker 04

  No, it was interesting to talk through this like that because I, it's one of the things I dig about your show. I think you, as you know, and as everybody knows, you hack the process better than anybody. And I think that I've been talking about, I've been talking about the thing itself in sort of reductive ways that are necessary when you become a cog in the marketing machinery around your project. But I do think it's very interesting to actually think back through the process of a thing with actual consideration because the truth is like, it's amazing how much you tell yourself. You start to discount

• 1:52:38Speaker 04

  phases of it. You know what I mean? Like, it's amazing how much the, maybe this is why like the mind also like eliminates the pain of a workout. You know what I mean? It's like you, if you remembered pain viscerally, you might not ever do anything again. You know what I mean? But you, it's funny, isn't it, that the function of the head has a tendency to... I don't know, focus on the positive in some measure, you know?

• 1:53:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, the selective remembrance.

• 1:53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, the selective remembrance. And it turns, it starts to turn things into a story and it's, I must say, I think, you know what I think I would say as a wrap up on it is, when I was thinking about doing this, I talked to Warren Beatty one time about Making Reds, which is his, his own incredible, you know, three hour long movie about American socialists. And it's one of the really great films of that whole decade about America and about the American character. And it's also emotional and it's about relationships and all these things. It's a masterwork. And he told me, it was, he told me that everyone told him that, that he was gonna flush all his chips on that bet

• 1:53:51Speaker 04

  and that no one wanted to see a three hour movie about socialists with documentary footage from people who actually lived through the era, you know? And, and he, he just went and did it anyway. And the thing is that when you grow up on the film and then you see it got nominated for awards and it's affirmed and everything, you, you sort of, you, you discount the, the, the fact that in truth for him, it was a very, very, very out on a limb experience and probably felt very half baked a lot of the time. And I think it's good for people, it's good for people at any phase of life. Certainly, I think it's good for young people to hear people who get a thing done,

• 1:54:35Speaker 04

  say like, it doesn't feel good at many phases along the way. It feels entirely half baked, you feel entirely behind the eight ball and discouraged. And this is an intrinsic part of, it's an intrinsic part of it. It isn't all fun. Even when you're like already, like you were saying, you're like, well, but you've had success in this thing, this should be easier. It doesn't get easier. It's, it's, anything that's worth, thing that's got any actual merit in it is gonna be hard. And the hard part isn't romantic.

• 1:55:08Speaker 04

  When it's hard, you know what I mean? It's romantic later. It's romantic later.

• 1:55:12Tim Ferriss?

  When you selectively remember it.

• 1:55:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's romantic later, but it really doesn't feel good along the way. And I think sometimes it can, it's nice to be reminded that it's been hard for other people when they were getting things done that you admired because it maybe gives you that extra little bit of determination or patience to persevere a little more.

• 1:55:37Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And when in doubt, find a friend like Toby Americk to call you up and threaten to give it to somebody else.

• 1:55:45Speaker 04

  I think people, people, your tribe, the people you trust, like sounding boards, it's like, nobody gets anything like this done alone. It's just, it, it's, you know, it, it's almost like when in the back of your book, you see an author, they think, things in its names, but when you really, when you look at it as a block and you realize what that really is, it's just, that's like a tribe, you know what I mean? Around an author, nobody, they, what's more solitary than writing a book, right? But you look at the, the network that's around an author and, and it makes them feel compelled to say, I could not have gotten this done without these people, right? It's, it's, um, there's, there's not many things that are, that are truly done in solitude.

• 1:56:30Tim Ferriss?

  Agreed. And a lot of things worth doing not in solitude also, to have companions on the path. And I am, could not be happier for you. And it means a lot to have you back on. Hope we get a chance to hang again soon and.

• 1:56:49Speaker 04

  Ditto.

• 1:56:49Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks so much for the time.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  Thanks for another great conversation.

• 1:56:52Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:56:54Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering. Over the week, that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:57:37Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Super Fat Nut Butters. I've got two boxes of them actually sitting within 15 feet of me in a cabinet. These little beauties are great. I've been using them as quick mini breakfasts, that's one use, and as on the go fuel for a few months now. I was pretty slammed this afternoon. I had a wifi debacle and I was preparing to record a podcast, so I didn't have time

• 1:58:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:00:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:00:53Tim Ferriss?

  and the possibilities are virtually endless for automating processes for getting shit done. And you may know, if you read the 4-Hour Workweek, that third step is automation. In other words, not adding headcount to a messy process to fix problems, but automating as much as possible. You want to eliminate, then automate, and only then delegate. And Zapier is one of the best automating softwares, if you can use the plural, one of the best pieces of automation software I've ever come across. It is the easiest way to automate a ton of your work. So check it out. If you want to try it out or just learn more, go to zapier.com/tim.

• 2:01:37Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:02:21Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:02:55Speaker 03

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