#426 How Obsession Built Christopher Nolan

17:58Tom Shone:And I go home, you know, this many times a week. And I go to the airport this many times a week. And so basically, it's just like, oh, I took it out because then I save, you know, whatever, 120 minutes a week instead of listening to music, I can be thinking about Microsoft. So this idea, I think, is really important that Nolan will repeat. He's like, you have to give your brain space to think. Now, there's another thing where he talks about his fascinations over and over again. And again, some of this is like almost like put ideas into your head and then maybe your subconscious does something with it later, maybe it feeds your intuition or something.

18:31Austen Allred:But he is fascinated. Interesting that he became a filmmaker because he's fascinated with the fact that cameras can see time in ways we cannot.

18:39Tom Shone:So just think about the movies in this nonlinear structure and the way he explains, presents the plot in his movies.

18:47Austen Allred:The fact that he is obsessed with seeing time in a way that we cannot. not. So he says, there's no other way to conceive of this. The camera sees time in a way that we can't. That's the essence of it. That for me was the magical thing. It's about that fascination. He goes, he talks about time over and over again. Time is something that we can't really understand, but we can feel it. We have a very strong sense of time. It affects us greatly, but we don't know what it is. We have clocks and watches, but time is inherently subjective.

19:13Tom Shone:So then he goes back to the fact that the discipline that he learned as a very young man in high school age from the boarding school winds up being a godsend. So it says it was at the boarding school that he acquired the punctuality, discipline, and indifference to cold weather for which he would be famous

19:29Austen Allred:among his film crews for. Now, he's also used to being different and separate and making his own decisions. Part of this is because he says there's a kind of paradox where, okay, his family left him in England. They live in Chicago at the time. He's like 4 ,000 miles away from his parents. So he's like, you have the freedom that you're kind of on your own as a young man, but then you have this rigid, disciplined, almost like constraints put around you that you have to

19:56Tom Shone:operate in. So you're at a time way more free than a typical, let's say, 16-year-old, but also way more strict and disciplined environment. And then all this time of being alone is really interesting. So this is pretty crazy. Because I think before Dunkirk came out, I would say

20:12Austen Allred:Inception is probably my favorite Christopher Nolan movie, but he worked, he had the ideas from the, coming up with the idea for Inception to actually doing it something like 23 years in between that gap. And so he was talking about when he's in these sessions at night, he first comes up with this idea of like, oh, like, what about this idea of playing music

20:35Tom Shone:or a dream within a dream? And so it says it was during one of these late night sessions after Lights Out, that the idea for Inception first took shape.

20:41Austen Allred:And he describes it. He says, the idea of sharing a dream, that was a jumping off point. And the use of music or playing music outside someone dreaming. And the idea that if you played music to somebody who was asleep, that it would translate in some interesting way. I really did come up with a couple ideas that went into Inception when I was about 16. The film was a very long time in coming. I said it was 10 years. It was probably more like 20. It was something I was thinking about for a very, very long time.

21:08Tom Shone:I mean I think it's what I know I've been talking about Edwin Land a lot I gotta do another episode on him I guess but I think he came up with the idea for the instant photography camera somewhere in the let's say 1946 and by the time it was fully finished and it was the size he wanted and it could do color I think it was like 1973 so it's like 30 years of working on the same idea go back to Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would talk about in the 1980s about having a handheld computer and when you read about what he's imagining and what he's envisioning that he could accomplish one day in the 1980s. Remember, I think the iPad came out, what, 2009?

21:42Tom Shone:Something like that? It sounds a hell of a lot like an iPad.

21:45Austen Allred:40 years before there were iPads. So I just love this idea of the idea that ideas can just

21:52Tom Shone:sit in your mind. And you just have to wait. You don't know how to make the thing yet. But you can use the ideas you have today 15, 20, 30 years from now. So at this point in the story, now Nolan is in college, going to college, kind of doesn't even go to college. He is the president of the film and TV society.

22:11Austen Allred:Okay. And he spends much of the time that he's supposed to be in college in this windowless soundproof basement. They said it was essentially his office. And what is he doing at when he's at the university of college, uh, college London, he essentially creates his own curriculum. He spent most of his time in the film and TV society, and he's

22:29Tom Shone:practicing and learning the job that he already knew that he wanted. What's the point of me going and taking these other classes very seriously. There was this great discussion in the book where one of his, I think it's a literature professor, is like, hey, I can see you're obsessed with movies. What I need you to do is that same obsession that you have for movies. I need you to have that same obsession for the books. And Nolan's like, I just know that will never happen. So he knew the job where he wanted. And so he's like, I'm just going to build my own curriculum and use this time, make the most use of my time and actually learn how the hell do I make a movie?

22:57Tom Shone:So he said he did spend most of his time in the basement of the film and TV society, learning firsthand how to operate cameras, how to edit, how to cut film by hand, and how to sync sound.

23:05Austen Allred:We spent three years in college making short films, running the film society, raising money to make more films. It was student-led. I learned a huge amount about the craft of putting films together. It was a great education. And before we get back into this, I want to tell you about Applovin. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. In that book, Peter Thiel writes, he says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. And that is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform.

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25:16Tom Shone:That is vanta.com forward slash founders. And then a few pages later, there's just one line. Again, I think he's talking about filmmakers. I think the best founders have this. You have a distinct point of view. We talked about last week. What is the point of building an undifferentiated commodity business? You should have something unique to say. You should have a new take on the world. And so he says, everything you do as a filmmaker is about a point of view. I think the best founders obviously have the same thing. I had this sticky note that's on my desk right in front of me. And it's just, it's the point of view of Steve Jobs summarized in three words, insanely great products.

25:46Tom Shone:That was his point of view. So his first job out of college is actually making videos for large corporations. It says after graduating, Nolan had applied to and was turned down by the National Film and Television School in England and the Royal College of Art. but he immediately found work as a camera operator in a small video shop turning out corporate videos and media training videos for large corporations. This is really important because then we start hitting on the fact that he is going to be relentlessly resourceful. All these ideas I'm discussing with you will fit together just like the plots in a lot of his movies.

26:14Tom Shone:The relentless resourcefulness is because he's going to be obsessed with control which we'll get to in a minute but this is what's fascinating. It's like how bad do you actually want it? He made his first movie on the weekends while working a full-time job.

26:26Austen Allred:So he says, the script was written with a view of what can I do with really no resources, just with a camera and scraping together money. He wrote the script on a typewriter. They decided simply to use the bonus from his cameraman job and shoot the film only on weekends for almost a year. They had to rehearse each scene carefully, almost like a play, so they could shoot it in one or two takes. Working out, they could afford to shoot and process between 10 to 15 minutes of footage a week. Every weekend, everyone would squeeze into the back of a taxi and head to whatever location they'd been able to scrounge up.

26:56Austen Allred:They shot without permits.

26:58Tom Shone:Nolan operated the camera himself. And so again, I just love this idea. It's like, well, I'm a sourceful. I have this goal that I have. Well, I also need to eat. And I don't have any money. So I'm going to work during the week. And then at the weekend, I'm going to chase my dreams. And okay, maybe if I was working on this full time, I could do this movie in two months. But it's going to take me a year. So be it. That's what it's going to do. And I love this idea of doing it on a typewriter. He, again, goes back to this analog world. one of my favorite fiction authors is Cormac McCarthy. And one of my favorite facts about one of my favorite fiction authors is the fact that Cormac McCarthy bought a typewriter for$50.

27:34Tom Shone:He used that typewriter for 50 years and wrote 5 million words on that typewriter. It's not the tools. It's the person. It's the talent. And this is what, again, Christopher Nolan has a very unique way of working, but I just love that idea. It's like, think about Blood Moridian, if you read it, or The Road, or any of Cormac McCarthy's incredible books that came from hands on a$50 typewriter.

27:58Austen Allred:It's absolutely incredible. So then we get into the fact that he goes to time and he had written the original for his first movie.

28:06Tom Shone:He wrote that script in chronological order and then he rearranged the order of the scenes. And so he was a fan of Quentin Tarantino's time. And he says it was heavily influenced by Reservoir Dogs. So I was very interested to see what Tarantino had done for his follow-up. And so he says, if you look at Pulp Fiction and Citizen Kane, so again, And anybody who gets to the top of their profession is going to have this historical database of knowledge in their head that they're going to draw from. So he's constantly referencing these movies in some cases that were made 50 years, 60 years in the past.

28:32Tom Shone:They have a lot of similarities in terms of their structure. In no other media is there this insistence that information be introduced chronologically. So he's like, so why should it be introduced chronologically in my very first film? So again, he writes the script in chronological order. Then he cuts it up and literally rearranges the orders of the scene.

28:48Austen Allred:And he says he rejects chronological conservatism, which I thought was a funny term. He says we don't tend to have chronological conversations either.

28:58Tom Shone:They go all over the place. So again, he's just saying, okay, well, why am I expecting it? And he thinks it's because of TV. TV presents things in more of a lot of chronological order that influence filmmaking. But if you go back in the films of the past, kind of reject that chronological conservatism. Think about the books you read. They're not in chronological order. Conversations you have are not in chronological order. So my movie shouldn't have to be either. And then I just love this idea. I always think about like a person's setup. Like what is their setup? Like what is their home life like in relation to their work?

29:26Tom Shone:I just did this episode last week on the merchant bankers. And there was one guy in the book that thought was interesting. I think it was an Italian guy. And he had a house, or excuse me, apartment, merchant bank, and a publishing house. And it's like on the street. Not only was he on the same street, he was on the same side of the street, just so he wouldn't have to cross the street.

29:43Austen Allred:And so in Christopher Nolan's case, he's got a house in Los Angeles. Okay. So it says his home in Los Angeles and the production facility that sits in a nearly identical residence at the end of his garden. So the two residences sit back to back on opposite sides of the same block, like mirror images of each other, like a tenant. So he's in his house and then to commute to his work, he has to walk through the backyard of his house to the backyard of his other house, which is then his production facility. And it says his commute between his home and his work can be completed in under one minute.

30:21Austen Allred:And so here's Christopher Nolan at 27 years old.

30:23Tom Shone:His first movie following is going to lead to Memento. And really the reason I'm reading this paragraph is I think doing the best job you can with the opportunities in front of you is going to lead to opportunities in the future you can't possibly predict. And so this other friend of his at the time is describing Christopher Nolan

30:39Austen Allred:when Christopher Nolan was 27. Rather than being discouraged by his rejection from his film school, he was hot on a new idea for a movie, the story of a guy who loses his short-term memory and tries to solve the murder of his wife by tattooing clues on his body like little mementos. Chris also wanted to tell the story backward. That was very important, he said. I couldn't quite see it, but when you're around someone who does, you start to believe it. Again, you can be sad or depressed

31:01Tom Shone:that you got rejected from what you thought you wanted to do. That leads him to this next idea, which again, how we started the conversation today. Memento is what causes his near vertical ascent

31:13Austen Allred:of his career. So he actually, in the year 2000, debuts Memento at the Venice Film Festival, and he describes the turning point of his life, which I absolutely love. So he says, my films always end the same way with some sort of sudden flourish. It's building to that moment, and then the film ends very abruptly. And for a few seconds, everyone was completely silent. I thought, oh no, they hate it. There were a couple seconds where literally I had no idea what was about to happen. I was very frightened. And then there was an enormous standing ovation and everything. It was extraordinary. it was the turning point of my life and so each chapter goes into great detail of how they make

31:53Tom Shone:each movie the chapter on mementos obviously the one we're in there's just one line from there again i think these lines give you an insight into who this is who this person this unique person we're talking about is he's talking about memento but he's really talking about what he believes in real life and i think this goes back to the fact that he just feels that there's way more to the world than we can understand there's way more to the world than meets the eye he says I find the idea of not being able to trust your own mind very creepy.

32:16Austen Allred:And so for the next movie to be made, Chris Nolan actually had to have the help of an older, more experienced director. So he's going to make this movie called Insomnia. And another director called Steven Sautenberg, he says Steven was the one that basically got Insomnia made. At the time, Nolan's going around and trying to pitch his movie to a bunch of major studios and he couldn't even get meetings. And so Steven Soderbergh, upon hearing of Nolan's difficulties getting a meeting with the executives of Warner Brothers, marched across the lot to the head of production and told him, you're insane if you don't meet with this guy.

32:49Austen Allred:He even offered to executive produce Insomnia himself, along with George Clooney, by the way of guaranteeing the then 31-year-old director, which is Christopher Nolan. And Christopher Nolan says, Steven didn't have to do that, but he did. He and George became the executive producers of Insomnia.

33:05Tom Shone:And this was another very important turning point of Christopher Nolan's life because then he starts to learn how to operate within the studio system, how to work with the big studios. The way I would describe what's about to happen with this and the way Christopher Nolan approaches work is that constraints breed resourcefulness. And then resourcefulness helps you maintain control.

33:23Austen Allred:By the end of the production, he had learned an important lesson about working for the studios. This is what he said. The efficiency of filmmaking is, for me, a way of keeping control. The pressure of time, the pressure of money. Even though they feel like restrictions at the time and you chafe against them, they're helping you make decisions. They really are. If I, this is great, if I know that deadline is there, then my creative process ramps up exponentially. Creative power in filmmaking is very important to me. I'm very protective of it. But I can get my power from spending less and moving faster.

33:52Austen Allred:Not giving anybody a reason to come and visit me and interfere or complain. I made that decision very early in my career. If I can work a little bit faster than people expect, if I can work a little bit cheaper than people expect, then they'll let me do my thing.

34:07Tom Shone:Again, constraints breed resourcefulness. Resourcefulness helps him maintain control. And so it's these experiences that he just realized that big studios, they have this way of just working that encourages waste and doesn't give Nolan the control and involvement that he desires. And he says, you're encouraged in a big movie

34:21Austen Allred:to very rapidly hire an enormous number of people, artists, concept guys, and all this stuff. Then you have to feed that beast. And so you're in a situation where you go, oh, I need a robot for this science fiction film. Figure me out a robot. And then you go away while they do whatever they feel like and come back with a robot. This is the most important part of this section, which didn't suit my way of working at all. He wants to be involved. They will spend literally, and he's talking about the big studios, they will spend literally millions of dollars on films that don't happen. Meanwhile, Nolan's working out of his garage at home, trying to do as much work in pre-production before spending any money.

34:55Austen Allred:It's the opposite of spending millions of dollars on a movie that never comes to fruition.

35:00Tom Shone:Another thing that's surprising about Nolan, it's a little different from a lot of people you and I talk about. A lot of people you and I talk about have this like delusional self-confidence, this self-belief, this like reality distortion field. He's a pessimist.

35:10Austen Allred:And it's not, what I would say is the way, the reason this is an interesting tool for him is he's imagining failure constantly and then doing everything he can to avoid it. I am very much a pessimist. I always plan for the worst. And then I thought it was really interesting when the book went into a 20-year creative partnership between that Christopher Nolan has with Hans Zimmer. He says, that's why Hans and I have worked so successfully together because I like to say that he's a minimalist composer with maximalist production values. It is a very big sound, but the ideas behind it are incredibly minimalist.

35:40Austen Allred:Very, very simple. And that gives me space to work as a filmmaker between the notes. What I've done with film scores over the years is to try and totally reverse the process and start with the emotion. Start with the basic heart of the story and then build the mechanics after that. Nolan's description of Hans Zimmer, a minimalist with maximalist production values, does double duty as a description of Nolan himself and hints at why the two men could forge such a close creative partnership in the years to come.

36:11Tom Shone:And so this is another thing that he does, I think is really interesting. This idea that you need to start with the heart and work backwards. So before shooting, Nolan actually types up a one page summary of the film's vision and then will return to it repeatedly. so he never loses the heart of the movie in the chaos of the film production. I thought that was really interesting that you start with the heart and then you work backwards. Go back. Again, I told you he's got a handful of these ideas that he applies year after year, movie after movie. We're in many years in the future. Since the last time I told you this, different movie.

36:42Tom Shone:But he says, you never expect success. I'm a very negative, superstitious, pessimistic person. Again, he's assuming it's gonna be failure and then working to do everything that he can to prevent that uh oh and it also goes back to making things that you're actually really proud of because he's had so many examples where they're like oh like uh this film got bad review it's gonna flop at the box office he kind of tries by he kind of temporarily buys into what the outside world's uh saying and then winds up getting once it's released goes to like number one gets great

37:16Austen Allred:reviews so this is what he learned about that what i learned was it's really important uh to me that I knew the film was good, that I knew that I liked what I had done. I felt very good about that. And you realize when the chips are down and everyone turns around and tells you that it's crap, that is all you have. So if you don't believe in it in the first place, you're taking a risk. You're taking a terrible risk. This has already been mentioned several times, but the fact that Nolan loves

37:39Tom Shone:operating within constraints, he's making this movie, has a very tight budget of just 40 million.

37:44Austen Allred:and it says this tight budget enforces Nolan's favorite conditions. Improvisation within a set of restrictions. A few pages later, it goes back to this idea that I've repeated a few times. I make films that are huge endorsements of the idea that there's more to our world than meets the eye. It goes back to this idea that he desires to live and to work in an analog world. Nolan's antagonism with regard to new technologies is far-reaching. An absolute believer in the difference between photographic and computer-generated imagery, he prefers the grain and texture of celluloid to the flatness of digital, location shootings to sets, and physical sets to computer-generated backdrops.

38:25Austen Allred:The appeal of his films in some ways rests on the same principle behind the popularity of boutique hotels, lo-fi recording methods, glitch music, and Etsy. That in the information age, more value, not less, will accrue to precisely those elements that cannot be cut and pasted.

38:47Tom Shone:Goes back to this idea that there's more to the world than meets the eye again. and also the fact that he thinks we're being duped by technology, which he repeats over and over again, the idea that you think all this information, like all the human knowledge is online. And so he has like this interesting thought experiment, not even thought experiment, an actual experiment to see if that's true. So he says, an interesting experiment would be to walk

39:08Austen Allred:into a library, go to a book, open the book to a random page, find a fact or piece of information, write it down, do that 10 times, and then go online and see how many of those 10 you can find. Our feeling is that 90 % of the information is online. I have a suspicion that the real answer is 0.9%. So the author of the book actually does this

39:27Tom Shone:and he has 10 facts and he only found one of them online. So not 0.9%, but way less than 90%. So then we go back to, again, this is the year 2006. And it goes back to the fact that he's going to find the best way that he wants to work. And he's going to do that regardless of what the rest of his industry is doing.

39:45Austen Allred:So it says, we live and work in an analog world. The Prestige, which is the movie that came out in 2006, was the first film where we were expected by the studio to digitize the negative and edit electronically. To this day, we've never converted to the other workflow used by most of the industry. We've continued to shoot on film, edit electronically, then take the frame numbers and cut the film by hand, and that's what goes out. The Prestige was very much the point at which we separated from the rest of the industry, or rather, they separated from us. and so a few pages later you can kind of expound on that you can easily set up nolan's entire ethos as a filmmaker he takes the rules of genre and he flips them another thing that he says he'll use the word strip away reduce minimalist cut so he says i think and he talks about the older he gets the more experience he gets the more confidence he has the more he can actually cut i think a lot

40:37Tom Shone:of that is about confidence because it takes more confidence to strip things away and so when he's working on the batman series there's this line by the joker that again sounds like it would come out of not the joker's mouth but christopher nolan's mouth the only sensible way to live in this world

40:49Austen Allred:is without rules and so there's this really he talked about the turning point of momentum being

40:55Tom Shone:you know critically acclaimed i think it won uh two oscars uh winds up i think returning like something like 5x or 10x its its budget and then he was able to like just take have this like near vertical scent but then he one of his movies makes a billion dollars the dark knight makes over a billion dollars at the box office. And this momentum changes his entire career. And then the way he thinks about the changes that he experienced during this time of career, I thought was really interesting.

41:20Austen Allred:So it says, suddenly his position at Warner Brothers went from solid to unassailable. The immediately thing that this did was extraordinary and it allowed me to do whatever I wanted to as the next film. Creatively speaking, they were going to let me do whatever I wanted to do. Everything up to that moment had been a fight or a struggle one way or another. And then he says, suddenly realizing this, I said, oh, okay, I'm going to get the last word. It was very liberating in a lot of ways, but it was also scary because you know that every filmmaker would give their teeth for that. So finally, you've got it.

41:50Austen Allred:And what are you going to do with it? For the first time, I was able to step back and go, OK, what do I want to do now? And then he figured out.

41:58Tom Shone:Remember, I said that these ideas can be dormant or ruminate for decades. And so he says, what I've always wanted to do was to do Inception. So throughout the book, he's always talking about these influences that he has.

42:09Austen Allred:he'll use the world as his giant classroom, take those influences and apply it to his work. But he makes a really interesting point here. He's a big fan of the short stories in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. And his point on the influence that he has, like you have to have something else going on in your life. Like somebody can't just give you a story and then what are you going to do with it? You have to have something to hang it on. So he says with those short stories, you have to have something rattling inside you already that then connects with that. But if you're not already predisposed to that, it just comes to you as a story and it doesn't necessarily spark anything.

42:38Austen Allred:So he took one idea from the short story that Borges wrote, and it's actually one of the main ideas in Inception. And that was important because he had taken multiple shots up until this point to try to finish writing Inception. He says, I managed to get about 80 pages in. I got into the beginning of the third act and then got stuck, and I stayed stuck for years and years. Inception was thus the work of half a lifetime, an idea first conceived by Nolan when he was 16, nursed at university, elaborated upon when he came to Hollywood, and finally executed in the wake of the Dark Knight's success.

43:12Austen Allred:Inception took input from its maker at every major point of his life. The schoolboy, the university student, the Hollywood neophyte, the success story, the father. What a paragraph. I love that. And again, there's a crazy line a few pages later. 23 years after first conceiving of the idea, Nolan commenced principal photography on Inception on June 19th, 2009. I would encourage you to buy this book, read this book, but you should look at the pictures because then you see how he like maps everything out. And so this is one of the most interesting ideas, this idea that first flip it, okay? So, and you can see how he like writes out the plots and everything.

43:49Austen Allred:So it says, when the director first hears or has an idea, his first instinct is to flip it, turning it almost into a three-dimensional object that he can hold in his hands or walk around. storytelling thus becomes a three-dimensional exercise like sculpture and then he talks about as your career continues you have this like confluence of events you can't and influences

44:10Tom Shone:you can't even almost like they operate like a subconscious level i think this is why steve job said that the older he gets the more important that he thinks intuition was and the intuition played a much larger role in his career than than intellect did and so nolan says what i've accepted

44:23Austen Allred:over the years is that the job of a director is one which a lot of what you do is instinctive and unconscious.

44:29Tom Shone:I actually, uh, was with a friend the other day. He's one of the greatest investors, uh, basically no one has ever heard of. And, and he likes it that way. And what he told me was very interesting. He says, the, the more I understand about investing, the better I get at it. He says something like, uh, the less I think I should actually have a team that it was something like performance could be like inversely correlated to the amount of people on his team. And part of it was because he's like, had this intuition or instinct that we should be doing something.

44:54Austen Allred:and you try to give it to somebody else on the team to do or explain it to them. And because they don't have whatever is like that intuition you have in you,

45:02Tom Shone:the subconscious that's driving you, they don't understand how important it is. They basically kind of like take an idea that if he just ran with it, it would have been a lot more successful and they kind of just fuck it up. But I love that idea. What I've accepted over the years at the job, director, entrepreneur, whatever case it is, is one in which a lot of what you do is instinctive and unconscious.

45:19Austen Allred:And so in any endeavor, you're going to get stuck. And in inception, you get stuck. in almost all these movies that get stuck. But Unception is very fascinating because then he talks about what you do when you get unstuck. And this is going to remind me of Rick Rubin. Somewhere a few weeks into the cut where normally you begin to gain a little bit of confidence that it's coming together, we just hit a wall. We got stuck for a long time. I couldn't get to sleep for a couple of days. It was just awful. I was like, oh my God, we've just taken$200 million and burned it in a bonfire. As you make a film, most things tend to work along this sliding scale of like, yeah, that's going to get better.

45:54Austen Allred:We need to tweak that. And you just adjust it. It's like tightening with lug nuts on a tire. You do this one and then you do that one a little bit and you do that one a little bit and you keep the rotation. But every now and again, you get somewhere where it just doesn't. And you're like, this will never work. This we will never get past. So what do we do? The solution was a ruthless cut.

46:15Tom Shone:So Rick Rubin talked about this. And again, think about what Steve Jobs did when we talked about Steve Jobs in exile. Comes back to Apple. and says, you have, you know, 300 products. We're going to do four. We're going to do this ruthless cut, this ruthless edit. So the ruthless cut in this book, what Nolan was talking about, is called the Ruthless Edit by Rick Rubin. Let's say they're stuck. We need 10 songs on an album and I'm working with this band. It's really important. You know, we have 15 that we kind of like or 20 that we kind of like.

46:43Austen Allred:Let's not try to cut that 20 down to 10. Let's cut that 20 down to three. There's, what are the three we cannot live without? And then let's try to add each one back. to number four. What is one that absolutely has to be number four? And you know if you got it or not. There's not one that actually has to be number four. That means you made, now you made 17 of the 20 that you're not going to use. So then you might have to make another 20, 30, 40, 50 songs. But again, when you're stuck,

47:07Tom Shone:just ruthlessly cut, ruthlessly edit. I absolutely love that idea. I think it's a really interesting idea. Goes back to his desire to live in an analog world. I think this is just a really great metaphor. The idea that you do not want to encourage dependency and you want to be able to find your way. before I read this to you, something else popped in my mind just now, where he talks about, you know, like his kids at the time, now imagine what you would do with like chat GBT, uh, but his kids at the time, like if they wanted to look up information, they just Google and they get it immediately. And he's like, well, when I was younger, I had like go through like the Dewey decimal system in the library or something, or like I'd have to hunt for that information.

47:41Austen Allred:And that activity of hunting, of working, of it being laborious to get what you want. He says that activity, even if you don't get take away what you got after the activity. That activity of putting in the work and the effort is valuable in and of itself.

47:59Tom Shone:And so he's trying to get his kids, you know, away from just overly like being dependent and overly reliant, essentially outsourcing their thinking. So he says, you have to be really careful on how much information you're given. There's a danger when we start to rely on particular technologies or on corporations

48:13Austen Allred:that manage our information and track our movements. They're encouraging dependency. One of the things I try to teach my kids is when we go to a new city, I like to wander around and get lost and then explain to them how I've managed to find my way without a phone, without a map. I just embraced that. I said, look, we'll get lost, but we'll find our way. It's something that applies to filmmaking very, very directly because you look at the plan of the set that you're building. You're always reconciling two-dimensional imagery with three-dimensional space. But again, I don't want to encourage dependency.

48:42Tom Shone:You want to be able to find your way. I think that's just a great metaphor for life. So moving ahead, he likes constraints. He doesn't like rules. And so he says what you don't want as a filmmaker is to feel restrictive. So one of his favorite movies is 2001 as Space Odyssey. It was actually produced in 1968, created in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick. And he just got a great line about this.

49:03Austen Allred:He says, that's why I say 2001 is the punk rock of movies. It's not that it breaks all the rules. It's a film that doesn't acknowledge that there are any rules. And so go back to that line from the Joker from earlier. The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. One of Nolan's favorite movies. This is his description, one of his favorite movies. It's not that it breaks all the rules. It's a film that doesn't acknowledge that there are any rules. And you see Nolan does exactly this. So he talks about how he built Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a war movie. That is a well-worn, well-known genre, right?

49:37Austen Allred:And so he's describing what he wanted to do. Pure present tense, pure climax. There would be no shots of generals pushing boats across a map. No Churchill, no politics. From its very first sequence, we are given the film's starkly Euclidean moral calculus, survive or die. What I stripped away on Dunkirk was the backstory. If you think about what he's doing here, he's describing, this is a product that is defined by what it doesn't have. He's rejecting that there are rules for a war film. He keeps going. We made a war film in which we don't use any of the visually chaotic devices. Lots of quick cuts, lots of activity, lots of smoke, lots of fire, bits and bobs flying everywhere.

50:17Austen Allred:That usually sell the idea of war to an audience. Dunkirk is entirely about the absence of those things. And then finally, the last idea I want to tell

50:27Tom Shone:you about is this combination of discipline and obsession. It's the fact that I keep going no

50:32Austen Allred:matter what, and I make sure that my team knows it. I'm known in the film business for having good luck with weather. That's inaccurate. I often have terrible luck with weather, but my philosophy is to shoot no matter what the weather is. Always shooting no matter what weather. Just keep going. Just keep going. Letting everybody on the crew and cast know that we're really serious about doing that no matter what the conditions are. Shoot in any weather. And that is where I'll leave it. That That is 426 books down, 1 ,000 go. And I'll talk to you again soon.