Eric Roth

20:46Rick Rubin:I couldn't talk to him, though, because he was under kind of a hold from the government. He wasn't allowed to talk. So we had to create kind of a guy in whole cloth. I mean, who was this man? But the first thing I remember saying, what kind of guy is a tobacco scientist? And he didn't want really very much. He just wanted to retire and wanted his pension wasn't even very much. But when they said, we're not going to give you your pension, he said, well, I'm going to start talking about what's wrong with this industry, you know. And he was pretty brave. He was a pretty brave guy. He was a very prickly guy when I finally could get to meet him.

21:19Rick Rubin:Anyway, that was the story. And it dovetailed with 60 Minutes, the television show. So they did a report on him, and then they squelched it because the tobacco companies didn't want it, but also the government was kind of involved. And it became very complicated with the personalities. Mike Wallace, the interviewer, the great journalist, because I think he was a great journalist. He was unafraid. And so they tried to not run the story, which made the producer nuts and said, what about the integrity of CBS? So it became a lot about honorability. And I remember Mike Wallace calling me, a journalist.

22:08Rick Rubin:There was a man named Lowell Bergman whose story it was. He was a producer of the thing. He was very brave, and he was a great reporter. and he was yelling at me, Michael Hall, as well, what makes Lowell Bergman the moral fucking arbiter and that's and that. So I just wrote it down. So it's in the movie. Wow, that's great. Yeah, yeah.

22:28Eric Roth:I couldn't have said it any better. Yeah, how often does that happen where real life works its way into the story?

22:35Rick Rubin:If you have real life people, and this happened in this Killers of the Flower Moon where we imagined various things that we wanted the Osage to say, you know, and then there was no way I could say it as well as, or Marty or anybody else could say it as well as the real people. I mean, we could give them sort of the ideas we want maybe them to express, and then they turned it into what was affecting them as human beings and their life stories, you know. So I could have never written that. I'm a kid from Brooklyn, you know. I have no clue. The only other instance that comes right off the top of my head, it would be on Star is Born, I said to Lady Gaga, let's just sit down here and talk, and I'll write dialogue for you from what you're telling me.

23:21You know, so if you see, and Bradley did the same thing,

23:24Rick Rubin:Cooper and like the scene in the parking lot where they're just sitting sort of bullshitting, most of that's written, but it made her comfortable, you know, so that when the real person shows up, they have, you know, either limitations or abilities that you don't even know. And she's an interesting human being. The thing that was so striking about her, we were doing a read-through, and the songs were in there. There was no need for anybody to sing them. Bradley Cooper would just sort of talk them through. But she started singing, and God showed up, you know. I'm sure you know that. She has something.

24:00Rick Rubin:Amazing. Yeah, that you can't. And so you have to work with, I think, who the person is. I mean, old story. Russell Crowe was not, he didn't understand certain things about his character and the Insider. So Michael Mann had me fly down to Louisville. He said he won't come out of his trailer, all that nonsense. And so I went in there and did Rick Rubin with him and said, is there a way we can find a happy medium here? And I explained the scene again to him. And he said, I'll try it, you know, eventually. And Michael, the director, is just trying to avoid having a continuing fight with him, you know, which wouldn't have been very productive.

24:35Eric Roth:Let's use that case as an example. When there's a log jam like that, what's really going on? What's it really about?

24:45Rick Rubin:I think he had fear. He was afraid, you know. In other words, if an actor feels he doesn't understand it, whether he's right or wrong, I mean, you need to find a way to articulate to them what you intended. And that doesn't mean you end up with the exact same thing. The insider, again, I got a call one morning from Al Pacino saying I had written like a page and a half monologue. And Al said I could do this with one look. And I said, let me ask Michael. I have no problem with it. And so Michael said, let's shoot it both ways. And they left the look in. All the words I wrote were out the window, you know, because he could do it without, you know, without necessities.

25:23Rick Rubin:And I said, that's fine.

25:24Eric Roth:As a writer, that's something that you can't account for or prepare for. an actor who can get the story across without saying the words. There's no way to prepare for that. There's no way to write for that.

25:36Rick Rubin:No, except for I think after a while you get the experience of that. Certainly less is more if you can, you know, even though I think there's some great monologues. And then as some directors just go like this, you know, cut. We'll take it out because I had a thing recently on, I think a pretty particularly beautiful movie that I just finished called Here. We'll see if it works. It might be a disaster. It's all set in one room over 100 years in a house, and the camera's locked off, so there's no coverage. It's just one angle. But the stories are beautiful of the people that live there, and so you don't know what to anticipate, you know.

26:15Rick Rubin:But I feel the storytelling is very solid. How did that come about? Bob Zemeckis, the director, Forrest Gump, and I have a nice relationship over the years, and I've done some other work for him. And he called me, he felt, it's a graphic novel called Here. And the artist drew everything from this point of view. Everything was one way through a window. Well, not through a window, but you see a window in the back. So he said, you have the right melancholy for it. So maybe I do. I don't know. But I also have a sense of my mortality, which is what it's about eventually, you know. So I could write that.

26:54Rick Rubin:and then he put in some uh he's very humorous and kind of farcical and lovely and uh but it's about everything because the dinosaurs walked through because anything that happened in that property marsh birds and it's quite beautiful i will see it maybe won't work i i think the tone is right i start crying like a baby in the first five minutes but i think it was because the rachel portman music was on it that was really beautiful you know so i don't know but uh we'll see how do

27:21Eric Roth:most projects originate does it usually start with you getting a call from a director or what

27:28Rick Rubin:are the different ways that a project will happen uh i think there's every one you can imagine you know like we did one recently i did with my son called walt grace it's from a john mayer song an old john mayer uh i don't know if you know the song john loves it and uh i didn't know john but my son asked me you think that's a good idea for a movie i said it's great it's about a guy who uh is kind of trapped in life, doesn't have a great relationship with his wife. He has one kid that does love him, one kid doesn't, or doesn't have a good relationship with him. And he has kind of a groundhog day life.

28:02Rick Rubin:He designs wings for like Lockheed. It's supposed to be set in 1967. And he decides to build a submarine in the basement, which I don't know how he's going to get it out of there. But in ours, it's like an outbuilding, a garage. And sure enough, he takes off in a homemade submarine where he's got, you know, propellers are made of fans and from the ceiling he's gone to the junkyard and it's spectacular. So there's also a feeling of Yellow Submarine with it, I think. But it's quite lovely, I think. We have some people who seem to want to do it actually now. So we'll see. And John Mayer will do the music, I guess.

28:37Rick Rubin:But so that's one way it came, things come. Others are just books sent to me, you know, would I be interested in. It's really about the subject. And then directors, Danny Villeneuve asked me to rewrite Arrival, which I did. And then he asked me to do Dune, you know, so we had a relationship. And Dune was a little complicated for me because it wasn't my favorite book ever written. But it was an interesting assignment as to how to make this the best. And I tried, you know.

29:06Eric Roth:It's one that's been attempted many times over the years.

29:10Rick Rubin:Yeah. It's a front history. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's tricky. I think he did a good job. I think it's, my problem with it was, I'm being a little too honest probably, but there's a character named Duncan Idaho in it. Now, this isn't a translation. I mean, we're supposed to be millions and millions. I said, where does this name come from? I understand it's a translation of whatever you want, Jammo Jacket, but it's not. But I think it's a prodigious book because he invented a glossary and a geography and everything else. And it was a surprise. I mean, I think Stars Born was the most important movie in the more recent times, not because it's a great movie.

29:50Rick Rubin:I think it is a good movie. And certainly I love the fact that it put me more in touch with the young people because young people really seem to enjoy it, even though it's an old story. But it made me feel vital, you know. So I was in my 70s. So I said, you can still write that. That, I think, gave me a, you know, I'm not saying I was done, but it did so well. and then all of a sudden they figure I know something still, which is ridiculous.

30:17Eric Roth:Is it different writing for a theatrical release versus something that's going to be watched on a streaming service?

30:24Rick Rubin:Well, that's a great question because I have tremendous guilt about—I began House of Cards. So Fincher, who's my best friend, I guess, in the world, one of the more loyal people you would ever meet, and I hope you have a time to meet him, he decided to do it with me. And I had actually been aware of it from earlier when we had seen the English version that Pacino and I and Michael Mann were going to make it as a movie because it's just Richard III. It's like, you know, you think these guys are so tough. Watch me go in this room and fuck them. And then he'd go in the room and fuck them. How's the English version?

31:02Rick Rubin:I've never seen it. It's the same thing, basically. It's just that the guy is not, he never wants to go past the station in life he is, which is sort of the whip of the party. In other words, and he's going to just manipulate everybody. You know, it's succession in that way, I guess, or succession is that, you know. and um but it caught on i wanted to sell it to hbo figuring we'd just get water cooler conversation like the sopranos or something but uh people started binging it you know and all of sudden these eyeballs became available and i'm not happy about particularly the results you know um i still fortunately get to write movies that are that doesn't mean they don't go right on streaming but they start at least with the idea uh but the only one i think if if there hadn't been a pandemic I think Dune would have played for quite a while.

31:52Rick Rubin:But with the pandemic, you know, people just sat and watched at home.

31:56Eric Roth:Is there any benefit in that idea of binge watching or episodes that you can tell a story over six hours, ten hours, season after season, as opposed to having to get it into a two-hour film?

32:10Rick Rubin:I've just been presented with that, and I'm not sure the answer. It's the same Dennis Johnson. And I thought, how come they haven't done a movie about the guys who've come home from war, right? Because every other era has done the best years of our lives, a movie called The Men that Marlon Brando was in. Coming Home, of course, famous one about Vietnam. So they haven't done that for this war. These wars, the Afghanistan, Iraq stuff, you know, and the guys are obviously in bad shape. And so I was going to write that. And Spielberg came to me with something else. and I started conflict and the head of the studio said, why don't you sell it to HBO?

32:47Rick Rubin:So I did. And he said, they said, who do you want to write us? Dennis Johnson. They didn't know who he even was. And I said, I'm getting him. And he wrote five of the most amazing scripts are called Unarmed. Everybody in it's an amputee or a burn victim. And the only triumph of it is one guy to walk across the street to leave. And it is so spectacular. And it's all written, as I say, in the subtextual way. And we're close now. Catherine Bigelow might do it. But it's important, I think. And we get to use all, we would have all disabled actors, disabled veterans, and disabled civilians. And I think it would be pretty incredible.

33:28Rick Rubin:I mean, years ago, I was going to do Cuckoo's Nest. And my agent said, they'll never make it. Jack Nicholson was not involved. And I was friends with Michael Douglas, really good friends. And so I went off to do a movie called The Onion Field. But then they got Jack Nicholson, and I went, oh, my God, I fucked the dog here, man. But I did come back and do rewriting, which was nice. But that has the same tenor of this, the black humor and anger, you know. So I'm hoping that we'll be able to do this. We'll see, you know.

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35:34Eric Roth:From the time you finish a script and you're happy with it, how different might the movie be than what you're visualizing when you're writing?

35:44Rick Rubin:They're all very. I mean, I think sometimes events take over. I'd say the movie is different from what the original was, The Killers of Flower Moon. I think it might be a more important movie. I had leaned into the Western nature of it, and then Leonardo decided he didn't want to play the hero, and he was right because he was worried that, I'm going to be the great white hope here, you know, saving the Native Americans. And that's what the book was, and this happens to be fact. So we went away from that, and Marty did his work and saw the movie. We always tried together to get the culpability of everybody, that people would just walk over dead bodies.

36:23Rick Rubin:You know, in other words, what is that all about? I mean, there's even a great trailer about saying, who is the wolf? You know, and that's the metaphor, right? You can spot the wolf. Don't worry. And I think they leaned into it the right way. and so that the movie doesn't have that sense of having to do what's sort of the white guy saving everybody. But it's not done in a kind of, I don't want to put her down, Rachel Maddow, but it's not done with headlines, you know. It's done with great taste, I think. I think Marty's, he's an extraordinary artist, and I would work with him when we're going to work again together.

37:02Rick Rubin:I'll work to the end of time with him, you know. But he's not always faithful to what you did, so you have to have a pretty strong ego, you know.

37:10Eric Roth:Well, that's what I wanted to ask about, about not being faithful. Are you ever surprised by the direction it takes? And do you ever come around to think, oh, this is actually better than what I had originally envisioned?

37:20Rick Rubin:For sure. For sure. And I also think things have gone where they haven't gone as well as they could have. For sure. I did a movie called Lucky You that I never understood. I found out why later on that the director had Alzheimer's, but I never understood why he wanted to do it. I figured, oh, he's going to come in and do something. It's about a love story set in Las Vegas with a poker player and Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana. And I thought it was pretty good. And I actually took it from, there was a movie that Elizabeth Taylor did with Warren Beatty called The Only Game in Town, and that was about her playing basically a hooker, even though they didn't call it that then.

38:02Rick Rubin:And he's just a degenerate gambler. And the end of the movie is quite beautiful where he's sitting on the curb and water's running down the curb and you figure he's just dead broke, man. He's got nothing left. And she comes, sits beside him and he sort of says, that's the way it goes, you know, if you're going to be a gambler. And he starts taking out$100 bills and making them into little boats and running them down the river, right? So I guess it worked out. But that was supposed to be the feeling of it, you know, what is luck and all that. And it didn't work. It was just no good. So I don't know.

38:38I guess I was disappointed.

38:40Rick Rubin:But I think you have to rely on the director is going to realize something, you know. You have to hope they have something. I mean, I have a sort of philosophy that, and I've worked with everybody, that you have to take a third way. You know, there's your way, there's the director's way, and the director's always going to win. One of the stories I tell occasionally is I did a movie called, this was The Onion Field, actually, and I wrote a, I thought a great scene and the director kept saying, it's not working. And I said, yeah, it's really great, just shoot it. He said, you know what, I'm going to go the other way, I'm going to leave in the script and not shoot it.

39:16Rick Rubin:And that was the end of that conversation. It wasn't very kind and I don't think it was very brave of him, but that's the way it goes, you know. So you got to figure out a way to be part of what they need to articulate what their vision is, you know, and they're the boss. I mean, this is a film, but I don't think it's bullshit. I think it's their film, you know. It's like a musician and it doesn't go any other way. I think, you know, did a movie called Mank, which was about the guy fighting for credit with Orson Welles, you know, on Citizen Kane. And he set the ball, no question, he set the boat off with the right architecture and the right journey.

39:50Rick Rubin:But director's got to take it there, you know. And if you don't get there and get to the right place, it's not worth seeing. Do you do a lot of research for the projects? Tremendous amount. I like every—God is in the details. You know that. Yeah, I do. But everything—I think everything I read at that point is all grist for the mill. You know, and that's why I'm back to, at 78 particularly, what are the things that are going to define— so I'm doing a thing called Rendezvous with Rama, which is an old Arthur Clarke book that they've made, it's not that they made 2001, I had it, it was written around the same time, same philosophy, and I have an astronaut that's been helping me, and he said when he went out of the spacecraft, he just laid back like he was in a bath and looked up at stars, you know, and so I said, okay, so if I can get that feeling, because I think the feeling in this particular piece really dovetails to the things I've been thinking about, that the thing that comes and interrupts these people's world doesn't have to have a reason.

40:55Rick Rubin:It might just be God. And some of the people who are kind of religious believe in this 2130 that Jesus showed up sent by God from the planets, and he just showed up in, you know, Palestine or Israel, whatever he'd like, and did what he did. And then they crucified him. He went back up to the planets, you know, and that he's still doing that, you know. So everybody adapts, you know, to whatever their ear is. But I think this overriding sense, and I don't think you can escape it when you get a particular age. Doesn't mean you have to dwell on it to where it immobilizes you, but I think it spans your horizons, you know, and that's a good way to say it, I guess.

41:40When you're writing, let's say, a monologue for character, how important is the content of what they're saying versus this is a great line?

41:51Rick Rubin:I mean, you would like to say presidentially that you just want to put the—no, no, I know, but I'm sure your ego comes in. There's no right answer. I mean, there's only your answer. I think there might, I get you, but I mean, but I think it's kind of narcissistic to only dwell on what you think will last, you know. Maybe the whole speech will last and it's more important that way. But I don't know if I really think about it either way. I mean, I think I try to write what's human. Is this what I do? Someone called me a sappy dog heart. I try to write that will be remembered. I like the fact that I built a legacy of things that I think I chose pretty well.

42:31Rick Rubin:You know, not always. We've had some monster failures, but I think pretty well. And I still think I continue to choose pretty well. And I mean, I have other issues, so it gets more complicated. So my mother was very tough on giving love. And so I always felt I needed some validation, right? And I still do. And my wife says to me, he's 80 years old. You feel like you need validation. you need like an Oscar nominee. I saw him, I said, I don't want to, but it's like, I want to go call my mom and say, look at my report card. You know what I'm saying? So there's your psychiatry again. It's like, yeah, I'm like, I don't know if I'm getting over it or not.

43:09Rick Rubin:I don't know. I'd like to.

43:10Eric Roth:That's an interesting thing though. When our parents pass away, who do you call? You know, when you get good news, you don't have that, that feeling.

43:19Rick Rubin:No, no, you don't have that thing that you could just share, you know, that you really love sharing, you know. Yeah, I think that's true, I guess. I think they do with my wife, maybe, you know. She's a doctor, and she's pretty supportive. But she doesn't quite get this world I'm in, you know. It's just different, you know. She relies strictly on science. Whatever you say has got to be accurate, you know what I'm saying? You can't just make it up. I remember Fincher being angry at me because, and Benjamin Button, I had some silly speech about with Brad Pitt in the middle of the night at the hotel.

43:57Rick Rubin:I gave her some bullshit about how you have to steep tea and this and that, you know. And David said, this is such nonsense, you know. And he left it in. Have you ever had a mystical experience? I think one. It ended up pleasant. It wasn't pleasant. I had cancer a couple times in my life. I've been very sick a lot. But I had cancer twice. And the first time I was just 32 and it was directly from my grandfather, colon cancer. And in those days, they just bombarded you. I mean, they just didn't really quite know, you know. And I remember laying in bed and I'm not religious and I'm certainly not Catholic.

44:37And an angel showed up and sort of form of a nun kind of.

44:42Rick Rubin:And she says, time to go. And I said, I don't really want to go yet. And I love my wife. I love my kids. and can we just forestall this, you know? And she thought about it and said, okay. So I don't know, that was my wish fulfillment, you know, but it felt real, it felt real. Beautiful. I mean, the other thing, the other side of it, the bad side of it is when I, I think when I get afraid or I don't want to see certain things, I imagine rats are going around. I see a rat run across the ceiling or something, you know, something weird like that. That's about as mystical. I haven't got, I think I feel more mystical when I'm writing, that I can feel what imbues me, you know, what makes me sore and at least makes me feel like I'm soaring.

45:28And I don't know.

45:30Rick Rubin:I wish I could say I did mystical. I'm not sure. I completely believe in magic. So I wish I did. So, I mean, I think that's what I'd like to learn how to, honestly.

45:39Eric Roth:When you've had that feeling of soaring while you're writing, is it just that the lines are coming? It's like, oh, this is good. This is good. This is good. Describe it.

45:49Rick Rubin:It feels like you've, I love to go swimming in a lake in the summer where it's just cold and feels like you're coming alive, you know, and that's what it feels like. And you don't have to judge it. And you don't even know because it's so corny the way I do it. I say out loud, the dialogue and the worst acting known to man, the voices never change, you know, any of that. And yet you feel like, wait a minute, you're not Mozart. This isn't coming right to you. You only have to erase a fucking note, you know, but you do feel like you're imbued with something. I don't know what it is. And I guess that's a creative spirit that you, and if it works, it's great.

46:27Rick Rubin:Even if it doesn't work, if you can try it out, why not? Do you always write dialogue out loud? Pretty much. I have the, I say you just character, it's so bad, it's embarrassing.

46:37Eric Roth:So you'll basically act it out for yourself.

46:40Rick Rubin:It's less acting. I sort of almost whisper it, you know, like to see, I don't know why, just to see if it feels right, I guess. And I also learned a long time ago, there was a director, Michael Cimino, and he had prepared a wallet for Mickey Rourke. so Mickey Rourke knew where he came from. I'm sure Mickey Rourke never looked at the wallet, but it had a fortune from a fortune cookie in there, a picture of his daughter, his draft card, and this and that. And his point was that every single character has to have their own voice. Every single character has to have their own psychological makeup, that they came from something, they're going to go somewhere.

47:17Rick Rubin:And I took that to heart. So I think that's a big key about how, with the dialogue kind of thing, that everybody sounds different and interesting and doesn't have A follow B and says something off the cuff. I mean, in other words, where you try to make it as real as possible.

47:33Eric Roth:Do you know all of that about the characters before you start, or does their character come into focus as you're writing?

47:41Rick Rubin:As I'm writing, pretty much, unless there's something so defined for them in a book or something where you don't want to make the audience go crazy, you know. No, I think like this one I'm writing with this rendezvous with Ron with the thing called that that i've slowly kind of made this commander the ship into somebody that was not really there and whatever i felt he should be you know and you just start describing things like you know i think i wrote that he has uh he's very taciturn but he has a great sense of irony or something you know so wherever that took me you know that was my first impression of him and then And a lot of it's just for, what I will say is that almost, I think every movie I wrote, except for Munich, began and ended with the exact same scene I wrote.

48:30Rick Rubin:Almost every one.

48:31Eric Roth:Yeah.

48:32Rick Rubin:And you start with the beginning and the ending. Is that typical? Typical. I always want to know where I am to begin with and where I am. The middle is a big mess. I have no clue, which is, I think, part of the fun. You get to take a journey, you know, and discover people and things and things you'd never expect. If you do it well, great. if you don't do it so well it's not so pretty but um it's yeah i mean i think it's wonderful and then i'll i'll find that i'll really struggle over the first like 25 30 pages or 20 pages and think i'm just not going to get through this and all of a sudden on page 70 you know saying and then you're done uh something unlocks something and i never fight it which i think is what happens with people with like um when they get this fear of continuing you know in the blank page and all that stuff, writer's block.

49:18Rick Rubin:I just change the weather. You know, make it rain or snow and all of a sudden you look at it differently, you know.

49:25Eric Roth:Do you always change the weather for story or do you ever do something to change your condition to allow the change?

49:31Rick Rubin:I think I do both. Yeah, I think that will lead me to do something differently. Yeah.

49:37Eric Roth:Like might you go for a drive or, you know, do something different instead of just sitting at the desk?

49:41Rick Rubin:That's exactly right. No, that's exactly right. I'm very hidebound and kind of, this has to do with, I think, with being born in the late 40s and being a 50s and 60s kid and that, look at it as a job in that way. I mean, I formally go to work. I get up, you know, whatever time, same day as it's gotten earlier. I've gotten older and try to do the Marshall McLuhan thing, stretch out the amount of hours available. but this came for a little bit from john cheever who i'd read got up at seven or 6 30 got dressed put his hat on his tie on his suit on took the commuter train into new york had rented a small basement i think basement or boiler kind of room place under apartment building where he worked from took his pants off folded them really neatly sat in his underwear uh took his hat off uh wrote wrote wrote wrote 12 o 'clock chime went off got up went and had a three martini lunch came back wrote till four put the seat back on it went to the computer you know took the computer trade home and so he felt that was a job i mean there's a lot a lot of artists do that a lot don't you know i don't think there's no rule for the same way you asked about how do you approach these things and what would you you know is everybody's different how they did i think i'm sure you You find every musician you work with is different.

51:02Rick Rubin:Can you work on more than one project at a time? Try not to, but the good news would be if they start dovetailing, where you're rewriting one and starting another. I have the next year pretty well laid out. After that, we'll see.

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52:49Rick Rubin:Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

52:55Eric Roth:does the breakthrough moment happen at the beginning of a project like let's say you're asked to adapt a book you read the book and as soon as you have an idea of this is my way in is that the big breakthrough or does it happen later it can do either like i read a book uh

53:13Rick Rubin:called uh damnation spring i was looking at the book that i assumed it was going to be about something it quite wasn't but i'm going to make it about what i thought it was going to be i thought it was about yeah i thought it was going to be about moby dick with the redwood trees it's about it's about a logger and his sort of uh cantankerous kind of guy and cutting cutting down trees cutting down trees and it's not quite the story and i wanted to make this guy be tall as redwood as his moby dick you know and eventually uh i don't want to give it away but what i think he does with this. But I also like to, where, as I say, God's in the details, I love to go off on tangents, like I want to do what a life of a tree is and why do trees survive nuclear holocausts and how do trees have their roots joined together and all these things we just don't see or know about, you know.

54:10Rick Rubin:There's a book called Overstory that's spectacular that way about sort of like short stories about trees and things you never thought about. And so I love that. So that's part of the, you know, the excitement of doing something new. And then there are other times you just kind of founder along and then all of a sudden something just hits you and you get it, you know, and you, at least you think you get it. You know, you don't know until it's all said and done and then you have to give it to somebody else and all that stuff. But once you write Fade Out and you just feel pretty good for about an hour.

54:42Rick Rubin:And then you think you fucked the whole thing up and you think you could do it all over again.

54:46Eric Roth:What's typical length of time that you'll work on a script?

54:49Rick Rubin:I used to work about a year. I've cut that down just because I really want to get more things accomplished with limited time. So I think it's like five, six months now probably, and that's probably shorter than I would rather, but I think I have to. And then I made the script shorter too. I used to do really long, like 180, 90, 200 page scripts.

55:09Eric Roth:Do you think in going from a year to five or six months for a script that the scripts have gotten better or worse?

55:17Rick Rubin:I think it's the material, you know. Probably some of it is better because I think I've learned through experience how to say things, which I before tried to say in 17 different words and now could say twice. And I also have a certain, obviously, technique about how to tell who people are and identify their personality. But every single thing I write does sort of give the same problem. How are you going to articulate this? the best possible way and how you can tell the story. Is the story going to mean anything? I want it to mean something, not to just fill up space, you know?

55:54Eric Roth:Is every great movie about something bigger than what the story of the movie is?

56:00Rick Rubin:I think so. I think so. I think it's something that's lasting. Yeah. I think you've done something of value. I think that's true. I hope that's true.

56:08Eric Roth:Is the theme of the movie the same as the moral of the story?

56:13Rick Rubin:Well, that's interesting. Well, Well, I happen to write toward theme, and I think theme is most important rather than story. Most people completely confuse story with theme. But I think you also have to know what the thing is eventually going to be about.

56:27Eric Roth:Tell me what the theme is. That's why I'm asking.

56:29Rick Rubin:Is the theme the moral? I would say that's a little facile. I think it's more than that, Rick. I think it's what makes something profound and not profound. And it's not for me to judge it as profound. You know, I'd rather proofs of their lives to look at that, you know. But I know on Killers of Flower Moon, Marty wanted to do this culpability about people being culpable with this destruction of these people. And how do we do that? And so it's really interesting to figure out how to do that. And I knew that made this thematically more than just this murder mystery kind of thing. has made it about the sort of sadness and the destruction and the quality of what human beings do to one another, the worst part, and what could be the best, you know, what's justice and all that.

57:18Rick Rubin:I mean, in other words, so I think it becomes where you'd like to make it feel profound. I mean, that's pretty arrogant to make you think you know what that is, but at least to yourself, you feel like I've really said something here, you know. Can the theme always be reduced to a couple of sentences should should best of all yeah i think should yeah i guess that's another thing i've really learned was uh you know everybody's kid about less is more less is more less is more less is more you know i think and i would like to learn more about that you know i think still i probably overload my life and things i do but maybe sitting being quiet is fine too You know, my wife says that, you know, she says, don't take somebody not answering you on a text, meaning anything.

58:07Rick Rubin:It's just silence, you know, and she's great that way. And I think I wish I wish I could get that. You know, that goes back to that validation. What the hell? They didn't answer me back, you know, and the silence is what I'd love to get to. You know, I think that's that's what I think I'd like to lead to. and maybe that seems a little cliche about wanting how you want to end things, but I'd rather end in quiet, you know, in a certain way. Otherwise, it's just the fucking noise, man. It just seems too much. Do you watch a lot of movies? Yeah, I watch like every day almost. And I'm going to go today.

58:43Rick Rubin:I go like once or twice a week. Yeah, I love them. I mean, even if I don't like them, I like something about it. I like sitting in a theater, big screen. I like something, you know, 40 feet. I mean, it's not that I don't watch movies on television or my phone like anybody else. But, yeah, I love that moment where something really moves you, a sound. I mean, I remember in All Quiet in the Western Front last year, there was a sound of just music. I'm sure it was music as they were going into battle or something. It was so profound. I mean, profound, I used too much. But it just soaked inside you into your vertebrae.

59:20Rick Rubin:You know, it's like that sound was so powerful. I mean, I'm such a wish. I guess if I had two things that I didn't do in life, I wish I'd become a novelist. But I was always afraid. And I wish I had the ability to do music. I think musicians, as I said to Greg, are the most nonjudgmental people. I don't know if you feel that way, but nonjudgmental, carry their art with them, don't really care much, mostly about race of anybody. I just want that music to sound, you know, and it's just transcended to me. I don't know really how to, I wish I could describe it, you know. And you know how.

1:00:01Eric Roth:There's always a grass is always greener. I know that actors always wish they were musicians, and most musicians wish that they were actors.

1:00:08Rick Rubin:Really? Is that true? I didn't know that about musicians. I never knew a musician wasn't basically except for whatever their, you know, problems with drugs or whatever else trying to recreate experiences and get that feeling all the time. I never knew they wanted to be actors. I thought they were pretty happy with what they did, you know, if they're successful. If you're not successful, it's a whole different world.

1:00:29Eric Roth:Have you ever been asked to work on an adaptation and read the book and just felt like, I don't see a way into this?

1:00:35Rick Rubin:Well, I've done it slightly differently. I've started it and I realized I can't do it and I sent the money back. I've done that like five, six times. And not because of the quality of the book. It just didn't, I just, I thought I saw something in it that I just didn't ever see. and then I never thought it went where I'd like it to go, I guess, which might be just my arrogance, not the books.

1:00:55Eric Roth:And then the other way around, are there ever times where you'll see something that you think it's either not good or doesn't have much potential, and then it turns into something really great without your involvement?

1:01:05Rick Rubin:Yeah, most times, actually. But the famous quotes are, bad books and bad plays make great movies. So, yeah, because they're sort of, you know, sort of people ignored them. And I would give Forrest Gump that. I mean, the book, to me, I mean, rest his soul, the man who wrote it. But it's just farcical, you know, sort of silly. And I'm not sure I made anything more than silly, but at least it had a heart to it, you know.

1:01:32Eric Roth:Was it a popular book before the movie?

1:01:34Rick Rubin:No, not much. And how did you come to the book? I came to the book through—I worked with Tom Hanks on what turned out to be a really bad movie that we had a whole different approach to, which was called the postman, which was a post-apocalypse thing that I tried to do as Candide with. He had four mules, and he said they were called John George Ringo and, I don't know, Sarah. You know what I'm saying? And it was funny. It was supposed to be sort of like Lilliput. It was like Gulliver, and he's in this dystopian world, and he's supposed to be an ex-postman. And so it had this kind of whole tongue-in-cheek look to it And also I liked it.

1:02:17Rick Rubin:I don't know if it was any good. But then 10 years down the line, Kevin Costner made a very serious movie out of it. And I want to razzy, which means you made the worst year movie of the year.

1:02:34Rick Rubin:So, yeah, I don't think you can quite know, you know, but it has to. I mean, to me, and especially now, it really has to speak to me in some way that I feel like it can be additive to it. You know, there's no point in just retyping it.

1:02:48Eric Roth:So did Tom bring you the book? Is that how it started?

1:02:51Rick Rubin:No. The woman who had the book of The Postman also owned Forrest Gump. And they had tried a couple scripts with the author and somebody else at one of the studios. And she says, what do you think of this? And I said, well, I like the way it transports you over the years. and his kind of constant belief in God, the girl Jenny and his mother, you know, it's kind of interesting and him being challenged, which we couldn't do anymore. But I thought maybe I could say some things about how I felt about where I grew up and how I grew up and what the turmoil was in the world. And then the director's a stick-in-your-eye kind of guy, but equal opportunity stick-in-your-eye, and he doesn't care if you're a Democrat progressive.

1:03:35Rick Rubin:He puts, you know, Marilyn Monroe's picture in the bathroom in the White House, that kind of thing with the Kennedys. And he just didn't care, you know. And the thing struck a nerve, though. And even though I don't think—it's funny how that movie lasted, boy. It's kind of amazing, you know. People really grew to that. But you don't know. You don't know. But as long as it occupies—it occupies sort of the most important part of your life in that way. I mean, equal with your children and wife and everything. When you get up, you can't wait to go. I like to be able to know what I'm going to write the next day so I don't have to be anxious about it.

1:04:17Rick Rubin:So I won't write that, but I'll just sort of scrap it out and then be ready to write it the next day so I know I have something to start with.

1:04:28Eric Roth:Yeah, I have almost the opposite, I think. I like having a schedule where I'm showing up to do something. But if I think too much about what it is that I'm doing, then I'm already working on it before I get there. And then it undermines it. Wow, that's interesting. So I try to keep a distance from the work when I'm not in the moment with it.

1:04:49Rick Rubin:Nice. I love that. I mean, I would be afraid of that. I would be afraid I wouldn't be able to get back into it or something. I don't know. That wouldn't carry over.

1:04:57Eric Roth:Yeah, I like that feeling of coming to it new. I love that. Wow. Every day, like I've never seen it or heard it before.

1:05:04Rick Rubin:Wow. Wow. But I do, see, I'm so hidebound that I'm opposite of you completely is that I read from page one every day. Wow. I think there's something to that though,

1:05:14Eric Roth:because context really is everything. And if you understand the flow of the information, I imagine it would be easier to continue it than to just pick it up where you left off. Yeah.

1:05:25Rick Rubin:So it's like I just was looking here that I want him, I'm going to put into this particular Rama thing that I want him, his opening line to be, I am a navigator. So I love that, what that could mean, you know. It's a great line. Yeah, I haven't thought about it, you know, and then all of a sudden I said, well, that unlocks a bunch of things, you know, what this guy wants to do. And I have a thing with him where his wife supposedly had died and he went back in the service. But people live, they can live to 140 and such. It's supposed to be 2130. But anyway, she said, you'll see me in your dreams.

1:05:58Rick Rubin:And he hasn't seen her in his dreams until he gets into a certain part of this alien ship they get into that has a water feature to it. and he gets in the water and all of a sudden it opens up all these other things, like a hallucinogenic kind of thing where he starts, you know, seeing her. And I think it can be beautiful.

1:06:16Eric Roth:I think it'd be beautiful. That sounds great. I like also someone saying, you'll see me in your dreams. It's beautiful.

1:06:21Rick Rubin:Yeah, I saw, I said, somebody said that in a song, I think. I think, I think in a song, yeah. Yeah, I get a lot from the music. One of the ones I took was, I don't know the group's name. you probably know where he says over and over, I can't take my eyes off of you. Yeah, it's a really famous song. I just love that.

1:06:41Eric Roth:It's a standard. There's so many different versions of it. I'm not sure which is like the original.

1:06:47Rick Rubin:This one was not somebody, a group I knew, but he says it like 30 times in a row, you know? And I use that in this thing I did with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright where he, first time he looks at it, he says, I can't take my eyes off of you. So I know that's a good romance line. How does poetry work its way into your work? Well, I'm really well read and I'm really interested in what the words are one in front of the other. You know, why do people put these in this order? And some are so much better at it than others, you know. The poetry to me, I think, is a sense of feeling that it's the same sort of soaring you get and then starting to believe that maybe this actually is poetry.

1:07:35Rick Rubin:I don't know if it is, but you start feeling like it could be, which is pretty freeing that you're now writing something. But that can either dovetail or it can conflict with the director. Some love you to try to be as expansive as you can be with prose and poetry, and others don't like it. I mean, they feel like it inhibits their process. And for instance, David Fincher is, as I said, I think he's a savant in some kind. He's just a genius. But he likes things really logical. He wants it to fall away and like that, and you have to explain to him why it isn't. And I like that, too. I mean, I think that really presses you into rethinking what you thought you could just sort of willy-nilly throw out there, you know, to the universe.

1:08:27Rick Rubin:And for him, he needs to understand it and that it makes some sense what you put and it adds to something else. While others are much more gracious and saying, go for it. You know, Marty's that way. Marty, if you want to write the movie backwards, just let's try it, you know. Let's try it. Yeah.

1:08:45Eric Roth:The directors are interesting people. Tell me about the different styles of the directors you've gotten to work with. How different are they? What do they expect from you? And what they're like to work with?

1:08:55Rick Rubin:Well, Marty is very generous during the writing process, a little more reclusive when he's about to go make it. So he then takes over. I think he inhabits the movie then. I think it's part of my job to have them understand the movie that they're going to make, oddly. In other words, this is what I can tell you I think it is. And whatever you can add to that would be amazing. You know, if you have a point of view, Fincher's rough. We argue like crazy. But he has something in mind that I want to try to get to for him. Tell me about an argument. Like, what's the kind of thing you would argue about?

1:09:29Rick Rubin:He would say to me, he'd read it back to me. He said, this makes no sense. And I said, what do you think? Everything you say that makes sense? You know, that's how we'd have an argument. And he says, well, that's just you're right or in you thinking you're going to bring out words that are going to, you know, somehow attribute back to you. I mean, you get very personal. He also, I know he knows, he knows things about me with the validation stuff. And he said, oh, you want to win an Oscar, whatever it is. But no, we would, uh, I'd sat behind him during Mank and he would turn around, what do you think?

1:09:59Rick Rubin:And I said, well, I don't know, David. And he said, well, you're wrong about that. You know, but we signed a fight it out and get to where we, I mean, we always love each other. He's the most loyal man I know. Most loyal man I know. So he's that way. Um, Denis is very visionary. He said that he felt that I was the kind of the spiritual quality of Dune, you know, because I got that hallucinogenic, you know, that whole tribal thing. And early, I worked with a man named Bob Mulligan who did Kill a Mockingbird. He was a very generous guy. Those guys in that era were very sort of Playhouse 90, if you remember that, or television.

1:10:41Rick Rubin:Yes. That's what they were steeped in uh and i'm not talking about deep theater i'm not talking about glass menagerie or something but uh they got um telling drama dramatic stories from stage plays in a way who their television shows stuart rosenberg was another one um uh he did cool hand luke and he he was one who introduced me to paul newman who i became friends with for life i was i walked on the set when i was like 19 or 20 with my they needed rewriting and went down to lafayette Louisiana and I bought a new pair of corduroys and I had a new briefcase and Paul said, our savior's here. I don't think so.

1:11:21Rick Rubin:But we were friends for life. And, you know, and I stay friends with a lot of these people. I like to maintain relationships with them. I think they all expand my universe, I think, you know, and in the main, a few are a little toxic.

1:11:36Eric Roth:You were saying about scripted versus ad-libbing earlier when you were talking about Star is Born. And in a way, it sounds like it stemmed from an ad lib. You got them to talk to you and then you organized it and refined it, but it starts with an ad lib. No, you're 100 % right. And I think it started more with Bradley Cooper, first directing assignment and not really,

1:12:02Rick Rubin:I'm not saying he doesn't know music, but it's not his life. He wanted to portray a character that he created uh what's i i suggested him he should use sam elliott's voice that's the huskiness that he kind of has there so i think i was going along i i rewrote that i mean because what they gave me i just didn't like and i said i have to start from scratch and i said i'll do it really fast but we'll do it together so in three in the morning we were changing you know but there was that ad lib stuff you're right it was or the improvisation would probably be better than ad lib improvisational quality of it, but also it had an accuracy because Lady Gaga knows what that life is.

1:12:42Rick Rubin:Bradley maybe doesn't know it to that extent.

1:12:44Eric Roth:I was going to say, other than the dialogue, how much descriptive writing do you do in a script? A lot, a lot, probably too much,

1:12:53Rick Rubin:probably too much. But I think it, some directors like it because it establishes a tone. It gives kind of wonderful, I think, visual possibilities. I just wrote, I realized I was reading a thing I'd written about James Cook, the navigator, the explorer. And I was writing something about that he had docked his ship somewhere in the Antarctic and letting the men have a Christmas Eve celebration. And it got cold and they went down below and he stayed up and he sang. He started singing Silent Night by himself. But I thought, I love that. But I said, i don't know if i have the boat right and so i looked at the boats and i forgot they have those oil lamps so i put the oil lamps in you know and they're rocking and i said that somehow refers to it and then we cut from that to the spaceship in 21 29 that's a kind of a junky ship it's supposed to be a work ship but it's very sterile and the people inside are very sterile and they're like monkish almost because they go for seven months without doing anything and they're supposed to be putting these beacons up on asteroids to warn people about the asteroids coming.

1:14:06Rick Rubin:Anyway, it's quite different than the oil lanterns, you know. So I love that. Yeah, so I do put a lot of pros in there, but I think it's my downfall in the sense of, because I want to be a novelist, so there's a way I can do it. People still let me do it. They don't let most other writers do it anymore. But I think it does impart to the director what I think it's going to look like some get annoyed say why do you have just talked so much so i said okay in an

1:14:34Eric Roth:adaptation how close do you feel like you need to stay to the original material depends on how good

1:14:40Rick Rubin:i think the original material is you know and then then there's the other side of um what does the audience expect and i don't know that somebody's there somebody's you're looking at somebody

1:14:52Eric Roth:no i thought i saw i saw a feather out the window strange oh i love that it's like i thought that's

1:14:58Rick Rubin:not strange. That's Forrest Gump.

1:15:01Eric Roth:It was a bird, but it was just a feather. So maybe it was a bird holding a feather, but I couldn't see the bird. I could just see the feather. I was like, that's strange. That's interesting.

1:15:10Rick Rubin:I like that. It was beautiful. Yeah. I just put up a hummingbird feeder yesterday. I'm a big hummingbird person. Beautiful. And yeah, I had my window at the, where I lived in Malibu, in the colony there. I had a window that I didn't look at the beach because that's too distracting to me. I was looking at a tree, and these hummingbirds just kept coming and coming. And my parents died that particular year, and somehow my mother somehow related to me hummingbird. And I put it in Benjamin Button, where David let it stay, where Brad Pitt's on the sea, like the Atlantic Ocean, and he's just been on a tugboat and got crashed by a submarine, which was a true story.

1:15:50Rick Rubin:And he was on now like a boat that he was safe, and he looked down, and he saw a hummingbird come up out of the sea. And he said, how did that get here? And I know how it got there. It's like a Robert Hunter lyric, right? Like, where did that come from? So, yeah, that's the adaptation part of it, yeah. Are you superstitious?

1:16:14Eric Roth:I am, to a certain extent. Are you? I don't think so. No, I think I am. I may have been at times. I don't think I am right now.

1:16:23Rick Rubin:But most people don't think they're superstitious, even though they're superstitious about things. It's kind of funny. They think that's science in some way. I like to gamble. So I play horses. So I'm superstitious about that a little bit. Do you go to the track on a regular basis? Yeah, I go once a week. And I sit with guys who are 800 years old. What's the first time you went to the track? My grandfather, a little Russian man, barely spoke English, spoke Yiddish. And I spoke Yiddish at the time. And he would take me, he had four loves in his life. He loved boxing, which I did. I fought. And he loved the horses.

1:16:58Rick Rubin:I'd go with him when I was like six, seven years old. He loved baseball. We'd go stand on an apple box at Ebbets Field. And he loved fishing. And I still love fishing.

1:17:07Eric Roth:So did you grow up on the East Coast? Yeah, Brooklyn. I wasn't. For some reason, I thought you grew up on the West Coast. Bedford Stuyvesant.

1:17:15Rick Rubin:Until a certain extent. Then I went to high school out here.

1:17:17Eric Roth:Has there ever been a window where you've stepped away from horse racing or has it been a continuance since six or seven years old? I think I stayed with it the whole time. It's amazing.

1:17:27Rick Rubin:Yeah, but I like, that would be superstitious stuff. I like all sports, I guess. But I think I am superstitious to a certain extent about some things. I'm not OCD about it. I won't count steps backwards or anything. But I think I am. Yeah, I'm interested that you're not. That's kind of interesting. but i'd love to know what you think of magic and stuff you know which is close to superstition well i believe in magic so i don't yeah i think you might yeah yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know what uh so some someone can't remember who told me this believes in i think called manifestation that if you manifest things you can make them come true

1:18:06Eric Roth:and maybe that's true well i think we do yeah i guess we do we envision these lives and they've appeared and it's unbelievable does it make sense no it makes no sense but you're able to inhabit

1:18:18Rick Rubin:them you know and that's how i feel about characters i write i'm able to inhabit them even though i may not know much about them except for the psychological thing that everybody has that's different you know and some things i don't understand because i don't understand the person but uh i try to make him not understandable and to some extent but then you find that the character may understand himself better than you think he did those kind of things i think there's a reality to writing these things, you know. Is it harder to write for women? Probably is, but I haven't found it to be. I mean, I think they all have the same properties.

1:18:52Rick Rubin:I mean, I don't know. Then we get into whole sexual conversations with things and I don't know if men are women. I don't think men are women the same that way particularly. But I think I've written a lot of good women. I mean, I think that they, you know, I think I wrote a beautiful character with Cate Blanchett and Benjamin Button where she's a ballerina. You know, I thought it was pretty lovely. But I always infuse these things with time. Like, and that was like sort of the sliding doors idea where if something didn't happen, another thing didn't happen, another thing didn't happen, then she wouldn't have been hit by a cab, you know, that kind of thing.

1:19:25Rick Rubin:And I love that. I love the randomness of things. And I did the same thing with Forrest Gump, you know. Is he just flying around or is it destiny? I don't know the answer to any of that. So maybe I believe in magic. You're probably right, you know. Yeah.

1:19:38Eric Roth:I remember in Farscom, I don't know if they were reenactments or actual old footages. Do you remember? Those were old footages, yeah. Did you write it in the script that we're going to use this footage from this event? In some cases, I didn't.

1:19:52Rick Rubin:Some they researched what would happen. Like I had, for instance, he's supposed to have been an All-American with the University of Alabama. They won the national title or something. And so he went and visited Kennedy, you know. And I have him visit him, Lyndon Johnson, as a veteran from Vietnam. And he gets shot in the butt. And Lyndon Johnson makes a joke out of him. The interesting thing about that was that that was all brand new technique. The only one who had done anything like it was Woody Allen and Zelig. So Bob Zemeckis sort of perfected this. But if you look at it now, it's so rudimentary.

1:20:28Rick Rubin:It's still silly, you know. But he's always – this thing here has a whole longer conversation for us about – basically about AI, but this first – this deep fake stuff where they – the movie will have Tom and Robin Wright offstage say, hi, mom and dad, this is Margaret. And he'll walk into the living room and they'll both be – they'll be 22 years old. Tom will look like he's right out of big and she'll look like she's out of Princess Bride. So I don't know. The morality of all that gets really tricky. I'm also curious how this will affect music.

1:21:05Eric Roth:Had you seen Zelig and realized, I can use this technique in Forrest Gump? It's a really radical idea. This guy can be in these different places, and we can use actual footage.

1:21:16Rick Rubin:Yeah, I'm pretty visual, and I thought, well, I think we can do this. Yeah, I think if someone knows how to do it, yeah, we can put him in that scene. And even worse, no one's quite done it, but I could put words in people's mouths they never said. So John Kennedy could have said, I love Hitler. You know what I'm saying to him? Whisper it to him. And it's obviously you're taking liberties there. But, you know, we had whatever he said and he laughs and this and that. So they linked it to something that was part of another all-American ceremony. And then they just put him in there, you know. Yeah, I don't know how I envisioned that.

1:21:52Rick Rubin:It just happened, you know. It's just something that came out of the blue.

1:21:56Eric Roth:It's a radical idea, and I think it's as significant in the long-term success of the movie as anything else about it. Oh, no question. No question.

1:22:07Rick Rubin:Yeah.

1:22:08Eric Roth:Oh, I think so. And that's magical again. We just had never seen anything like it before. And that idea of seeing a fictitious character in a familiar real-world situation is very interesting.

1:22:22Rick Rubin:Yeah, it's very odd. And there was a, do you remember the comedian on the radio, Phil Henry? Yes. Yes. He did all those kinds of different voices. He was kind of something nasty, a little racist, but somebody called me and said, you need to listen to Phil Henry tonight. So he said, he's announcing Forrest Gump is dead. So I said, I joined in and I said, hi, I'm the writer of Forrest Gump. And yeah, we're sad to say. And I see Quentin Tarantino just did that with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the character that Leonardo played, he said was dead, that he had died.

1:23:00Eric Roth:So sometimes, yeah, it's confusing what's real, what isn't. What are your all-time favorite movies as a fan?

1:23:08Rick Rubin:I love a movie called Amarcord that Fellini made. It's like a dream. 2001 is probably my most favorite. Godfather II, probably the ones that are traditionally, you know, that most people would. I was talking yesterday with somebody. I used to, when I was young, much younger, I loved the movie Giant. I thought that just summed everything up for big movies. And I'd watch it again. It's not very good, you know. But there's that James Dean being heroic and climbing up and getting oil and Elizabeth Taylor. And there's something very American about it. I'm very American in my own way. I love things about America that are, I think it's very moving about people who put their lives in jeopardy.

1:23:53Rick Rubin:And then there's an ideal that we used to have, and I hope we still have. I don't know. We have a very rural place in Montana, and I'll talk to these guys, and we have completely different points of view. And fortunately, we'll be able to get over them, you know, just so we can have other things to talk about. But it's just, it's a shame the country is so divided about the things that we all care about. I don't know what that's all about. I don't know what's happened. You know, there's so much hatred and racism and everything else, you know.

1:24:22Eric Roth:Are there any things that you firmly believed when you were young that now you've gone 180 on?

1:24:28Rick Rubin:Yeah, I think, well, my parents were both dyed-in-the-wool communists. I was a red diaper baby. I can't tell you the number of times we stood in the rain to free the Rosenbergs. And I think their intentions were really good, but they forgave the same fault to those people that, you know, you have to forgive all sorts of things. And my dad was a communist till his dying day, you know, and he thought even Stalin was pretty great, you know. So those are things that just don't resonate anymore that way. I think as American Communist Party members, they probably had some good beliefs about sort of socialism, you know, that, you know, how can you help people?

1:25:08Rick Rubin:And I think that was good. The other thing is, since I've had cancer and stuff, I'm not afraid of dying. But I am so interested in what I thought was kind of constant. And it's not anymore about, as you get older, what are these things that come toward the end of things? And what can you expect and what you can't? And I think I probably earlier on felt, well, you know, maybe it's X, Y, or Z. I even thought the other day we were in London, outside of London, in this beautiful cathedral, ninth century or something. And I said, what if it was all true? That maybe all this was, there was a Jesus. I mean, never mind that.

1:25:53Rick Rubin:Maybe all Buddhism, whatever it is, that all what we think is just, you know, made up mythology. But what if some of it's true? I mean, maybe it could be. So why not? Why not open your mind? I remember Tom Hanks once yelling at me. We were having, he was an evangelical, I think, early on in his life. And we were talking about religion, and I was saying something kind of atheistic and kind of adamant about it. And he said, how do you know? And I said, I don't know. I don't know why I think I know. And I think that's the big difference. You know, you assume you know so much, and then that's your ego, narcissism, and all.

1:26:28Rick Rubin:And then you find out you are wrong about many things. It's like, you know, I used to love to, this was before TSA and all, but I followed Joan Didion in the sense of I was actually friendly with her and John. But she would sit in airports and write about people as they came off of planes. That's how she would design characters. And I did that for a little bit. And then you realize, well, you're wrong about these people. You know, you have certain ideas you're going to create. Yeah, it's a fantasy. Yeah, yeah. It's fun to do, but you're just always surprised. You're judging a book by its cover, and you figure this tattooed beast, and then all of a sudden they start talking about Keats or something.

1:27:10Rick Rubin:It's like, what the hell? I love that. I remember we were—Tupac Shakur came in to actually read for Forrest Gump to play Bubba. I didn't know who he was. And then he was renting a house in the colony and he was sitting on this stoop and he said, Mr. Roth. I said, I came over and I said, how are you? And I knew he was Tupac Shakur at that time. And he said, you don't remember I had tried out for that. I said, why would you try out for that? I said, I don't know. I wanted to try something different and I want to find out who I was and this and that. And there you go, book by the cover, you know.

1:27:45Rick Rubin:And then here's this great artist, you know. Great, great artist, yeah. Did you ever see Unforgiven? Oh, yeah. I love that movie. Yeah, I love the writer, David Peoples. He wrote Blade Runner also.

1:27:58Eric Roth:Wow.

1:27:59Rick Rubin:He's an amazing writer. And then I rewrote him on Munich, and I know him quite well. He's about my age. He's an incredible writer. There used to be a whole world of screenwriters that were only screenwriters, not writer-directors. So there's very few left. But Bo Goldman was probably one of the better writers ever. He won an Oscar for Harold and Melvin and for Cuckoo's Nest. we call both sides of the plate.

1:28:25Eric Roth:One of the things that was interesting, I remember when I saw Unforgiven, I bring it up because up until then, in a Western, you expected the good guy was a clear-cut good guy and all of the attributes he had was noble and the bad guy was the bad guy and he was evil. And Unforgiven broke that mold. Completely, yeah. And it feels like maybe everything changed since then, That idea of just the good guy versus the bad guy, maybe that became obsolete with that movie.

1:28:57Rick Rubin:I think it probably did. I mean, to some extent, except for they have big super action heroes. And, you know, so I don't know. You know, those are the black hat and the white hat. You wear the white hat, you're the hero. The black hat, you're not. I tried to write a movie for Clint Eastwood, a Western, his last Western. And Bradley Cooper got me involved. And he said, the only thing I don't want is you to do a sequel to Unforgiven. And I said, I get that. So what I did was invent him as an ex-outlaw. This was supposed to be 1906, right after the San Francisco earthquake. And he's a kind of policeman in, quote, Chinatown for that era.

1:29:36Rick Rubin:And somebody comes back because he had been an outlaw in the olden days. He supposedly killed the person's father. And he came back and stabs him and this and that. And then he says he's dying. and they have this whole journey to take him home and what happens along the way, these people. And Bradley Cooper plays his son. But the big point of it was he's completely full of shit. He had never been an outlaw. And he created this whole myth for himself. And so when he had to get in trouble kind of toward the end of this, he got himself out of it by being brave. And he didn't have to make up a story.

1:30:13Rick Rubin:But I love the whole idea. So did Clint. He said, oh, my God, the idea of just pretending you're somebody and everybody giving you, you know, your props for that turns out to be feet of clay, you know. Yeah. But then it turns around. It's beautiful. Yeah. That's what I did at the end. I turned it around for him. Yeah. Yeah. But would you say every story is a love story? Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I think what is the only thing we can't define? Love. I mean, it's probably the most primordial, important thing there is, probably, right? I don't know if you can define it. I can't define it.

1:30:54Rick Rubin:Maybe other people can.

1:30:55Eric Roth:How far can you stray from the archetypical Hollywood movies, happy ending, romantic tension, conflict? Are those rules to follow, or can you break those rules?

1:31:07Rick Rubin:Well, I think you can break any rule. But I think you always will end up oddly with the same Shakespearean structure. Like the perfect example is Pulp Fiction. He told the story backwards and forwards, but he still had to have a beginning, a middle, has a beginning that states the problem, the middle that exacerbates it, has a catharsis, which leads you to the ending. And so I think it's harder to do that. But I think as we modernize things like the great Charlie Kaufman would do things like adaptation where he's adapting the adaptation and making it part of his life and his brother's life or an imagined brother.

1:31:51Rick Rubin:I mean, so it's wonderful complications or sunshine of the spotless mind, all that. But you still have this. I always found at least even in those I could tell you the structure of them. So I think that's a constant. I guess it has to be. Maybe it has to be. But the ending stuff, I think the only truth about, I think in love stories that you should end where things are not resolved. They feel either brokenhearted. Very rarely are happy love stories. You want to have a bittersweet ending where somebody can't resolve it and you can't bring it to fruition. Whether someone dies or someone leaves. You want a sort of wish fulfillment, hoping that they're in another world.

1:32:36Rick Rubin:I also believe—so here's magic. I believe that Francis Coppola and I were talking about this, that great movies continue—great books, plays, music, whatever—inhabit you in this. Like, they live on the other side of the moon, and they're all continuing their lives. The godfather people are all out doing whatever they do in whatever movies you love, and they're there. and you can always just go pick them up and put them back in your pockets, you know? And I love that idea. It's beautiful. I started, I was once going to, it didn't work out too well, but I did Cat in the Hat. And I started that he was one of these kind of magical creatures that lived on the other side of the moon.

1:33:18Rick Rubin:And I would get a phone call, we need your help kind of thing, you know? But the only thing I loved about that script was, I think it was a good script altogether, other, but I rhymed every word like a Seuss book. You know, I love it. Was it going to be animated or no? No, no, no. It was live action. And they ended up doing a really, I thought, bad movie with Jim Carrey, just over the top stuff. But what I made, it was primal that the mother was pregnant and the children were very jealous and afraid of what was coming into the house. And so the thing one and thing two, you know, all this stuff, thing one and all that.

1:33:55Rick Rubin:It's kind of great. Yeah, it's kind of fun.

1:33:57Eric Roth:Tell me about the old days in New York, the experimental film world.

1:34:01Rick Rubin:Oh, I love that. I was really part of that. I was going to NYU film school and I gravitated down to, oh, actually I was an English major to begin with at Columbia, but gravitated down to this, everything was an alphabet city, you know, below St. Mark's Place and Bob Downey Jr., Ed M. Schweiler, all these people doing these things and a place called the millennium film workshop where you could just move around rooms and was this in the 60s like 68 67 65 yeah that whole era Andy Warhol you know some of his people were there um I knew some of them I know Moriarty and a few other people but um I knew Bob Downey I worked for in like four movies they were all insane bob downey senior and uh but all these really interesting artists but it's interesting how they just disappeared i don't know some just got old obviously but there were a continuation i think a lot about from you know jack kerouac and all that i was gonna say beatniks yeah yeah beatniks basically that's like bob's in here his mother was a beatnik you know she always wore black and that whole thing.

1:35:13Eric Roth:How has the movie business changed over the course of your life?

1:35:17Rick Rubin:Well, the loss of theaters. I mean, the idea that not to watch a movie in a theater is the most important thing. After that, it would be, there used to be personal relationships. You may not even like the people, but you sort of knew everybody. There was a lot less content providers. There were probably seven, whatever the big studios were.

1:35:34Eric Roth:Was it just a smaller business overall? Smaller world felt like a high school,

1:35:39Rick Rubin:but now it's a big high school. You sort of knew your place in it, what you wanted to get to, all that. But, you know, if I just had this happen recently, that if somebody decided not to do a project of yours, saying I'm going to pass on this, right, they would call you up and tell you why, you know, or it's just not for me. Even if it's that simple, it might not my cup of tea. But I appreciate you trying, you know, that kind of thing. Now you never hear from anybody. It's just your agent says they're not going to do it. You know, the personality, that's me. That's how I felt. I mean.

1:36:15Eric Roth:It feels like less of a human business. Yeah, exactly. More commerce than relationship.

1:36:21Rick Rubin:Yeah, and it's become even the rallying cry, which is sad, is that everybody says nothing matters. And that's a tragedy to me. I'm sorry, because I think it should matter, you know, what you're doing, what you're saying. Even if it's not my cup of tea, it doesn't matter, you know. write the best action movie, write the best Star Wars, whatever you want to do. It's just, I don't know. I don't know about the younger people the way I wish I had. My son's young. He's a director now, and my other son's a wonderful writer, and they have different looks at things.

1:36:56Eric Roth:When you're writing a character, do you typically have an actor in mind to play it? Not mostly.

1:37:02Rick Rubin:I don't know. I don't like to do that too much. Sometimes, I mean, it's part and parcel of the deal. like i knew tom hanks was going to be forrest gump so he was great because he could go in and pitch the thing he said i'm sitting on a bench and i'll do all that stuff as an actor uh i would prefer i have a general idea general idea and then you got to get more is that a common thing for an

1:37:23Eric Roth:actor and a writer to get together and put something together and then pitch that as

1:37:29Rick Rubin:opposed to coming from a director it feels to me like it is i don't know anymore you know yeah i I think it is, yeah. But I've still done, like, when we're done here, I'm going to Zoom with Jeremy Strong, that actor. And we have, I think, a pretty great idea. Maybe we'll figure it out with him. I'll be glad to do it with him, you know? But it's more unusual with actors. Actors are good because they're only busy for, like, four months out of the year, or, you know, then they have time. Directors are impossible because, you know, it's a year and a half of their lives or whatever, two years. And so if you don't get it done, you ain't seeing them for two years.

1:38:08Rick Rubin:They'll be doing something else, you know.

1:38:10Eric Roth:Yeah. And it also seems like they're so in for two years on a project that after it, it's like they're not even themselves.

1:38:18Rick Rubin:No, that's absolutely right. I mean, I had opportunities to direct when I was younger and I made a decision I'd rather stay with my children. You know, that's not that I'm so heroic. But that's what I decided. Because you're gone. You're just gone. You're missing their lives. and they know it, but something else is more important to them.

1:38:38Eric Roth:Did you always want to be a writer from the beginning?

1:38:41Rick Rubin:Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've toyed with one point I said, I think I want to be a doctor, which was ridiculous. I can't even add six and eight. And I said, I think I'll go back to school and take all those courses, the organic chemistries, all that, and then go to some bad medical school like Grenada or Yankton or something, you know. So, I mean, what I admire about your life, as little as I know about you, is that you at least are experiencing so many things. And I wish I had experienced more things.

1:39:11Eric Roth:Well, I am now. I didn't for the majority of my life. Oh, you didn't? No, I was sat in a dark room for 18 hours a day for 30 years.

1:39:20Rick Rubin:Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Or I'm not sorry. Whatever. You probably learned a lot from that. Yeah. I would never have that discipline.

1:39:27Eric Roth:No, this is a new adventure. I realized I can do my work anywhere. Anywhere. And I might as well do it in a beautiful place. And I first had that revelation when I started working in Los Angeles versus New York, because even though I would still work all day, it felt like I was on vacation compared to being in New York.

1:39:45Rick Rubin:I got you. Wow. Well, my sort of regret is so like juvenile. It's like romantic, right? I wish I had had that romantic year in Paris with whoever, you know, or just on my own or, you know, I never did those things or, you know, London, whatever, you know, Ireland and it's not going to happen, you know, so all of a sudden. It can. I mean, it would just be a different one.

1:40:10Eric Roth:It would be the different version of a romantic year in Paris. You can do that.

1:40:15Rick Rubin:Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. No, you're so right. I sort of wish I had done when I was 30, you know what I'm saying? I don't know why. It just would add to my experiences. I always wanted my life to be like a Jack London flyleaf of his novel is that he was a, you know, a fisherman and whatever else. He went to the Alaska and all that stuff, you know, and that's creating a personality. I guess I'm not, you know. It all worked out. It all worked out. Exactly. If I would just get that in my head, you know, because there's too many small things. It's like my mother would say to me, don't sweat the small stuff, you know, and she's so right.

1:40:53Rick Rubin:And I sweat the small stuff still, though. It's like, I wish I can stop this nonsense about things that don't matter. You know, I'm a little better with it. I'm a little better with it. I had a whole thing. I won't mention what it was, but this whole weekend, I was like kind of upset about something. And I realized this is so fucking stupid. What in the world? And then you get yourself into a situation where I was mad at somebody and then they texted me and should I ghost them and all that whole thing. You know, it's like so petty. So juvenile. Oh, so juvenile. So I did. That's amazing. For the moment, for the moment.

1:41:31Rick Rubin:That's amazing. Yeah, that's funny.

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