#799: Richard Taylor and Greg Broadmore, Wētā Workshop — Untapping Creativity, Stories from The Lord of the Rings, The Magic of New Zealand, Four Tenets to Live By, and The Only Sentence of Self-Help You Need

29:00So my wife and I have run our company together for 37 years. We started off the business in the back room of our flat. It was actually our bedroom. We used to have a sheet of MDF, we call it custom board, that we would flip onto the top of the bed and we would make things on that board. Peter Jackson was interviewed once and he says, and I misquote, I remember coming into Richard and Tanya's bedroom and it stunk of the same rubber and fiberglass smells of my own bedroom, right? Because he was also making everything in the early years in his bedroom. So that's where we began. We moved workshops nine times.

29:45Our first collaborator, employee contractor collaborator, came about two years in, in the form of the gentleman Clive I mentioned, to do eyeballs. And today we have about 400 people operating across seven business centers. We have design and manufacturing for the world's creative industries, which is about 170 of our team. We also make digital games. We do merchandising, collectibles. We've done hundreds of collectibles over the last 27 years. We also have a location-based experience division, and we work on some of the world's largest museums, immersive experiences. We've done the largest pavilion for the Dubai Expo, which remains open as a museum.

30:38We've done the largest traditional Chinese medicine museum in China, which actually saw us design the building 37 ,000 square meters, et cetera, et cetera. We have a creative media division where we are servicing people like Jay Chow, Asia's largest recording artist, a great Chinese musician. and we're doing work for him. He's actually Taiwanese. We are going on holiday. We also run two retail stores. We operate three tourism offerings, including our significant location-based experience called Weta Workshop Unleashed in Auckland. We have a robotics division developing and building very high-performance humanoid robots, which we're trying to commercialise at the moment.

31:30Greg, help me here. What else have I forgotten? No, that's a bunch of it. And everything in between, right? We do a lot of service providing to private and public commissions, a lot of very unique work for people's homes. We're just about to deliver two crazy objects or installations that we've built for someone's private home. These have taken each a year to build. So you can imagine how complex and how significant they are. So that's where we've got to today, a multifaceted design, manufacturing, and entertainment company. And that's a desire to try and give creative careers to as many New Zealanders as possible, basically.

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33:23I would say, by the way, maybe you mentioned public sculpture in there, but we've done some amazing public sculptures as well. Huge works. You mentioned that, but one of the things that I think characterizes the workshop is that it is a workshop you went through, Tim. It's a workshop, concrete floor, lots of bandsaws. The sword makers. Right, machinery and everything. It's a very tactile, physical place. But Richard has created an environment where new technology, new interesting ways of approaching things is always welcome. So as Richard says, we now do video games, we do location-based experiences.

33:55Richard, as far as I knew, was the first person in the world that I saw around me that was bringing in 3D printing and 3D milling and 3D tools into this very physical place. I don't think you're afraid of any technology and you're very interested in all of it, regardless of your love and fascination with physical tactile things. It's like, how do we solve the problem creatively? It's just mesmerizing how many new technologies and new approaches turn up all the time. And it's interesting, just yesterday, someone said to me, the perception is that you must run the company from a boardroom through executives, et cetera, et cetera.

34:32And that couldn't be further from the truth. As you saw, Tim, when you came, my wife and I are an integrated part of every component of our business. I'm on the workshop floor every day doing the work that we do. When I'm not traveling with Rhi around the world, chasing work and delivering jobs, etc. We have an extraordinary group of senior management people that have grown up primarily in the building. A lot of our team have been with us over 25 years. Over half the company have been with us over 15 years. So those people, there's no need for a second language because they just know as deeply as I do what's required for each division and to get through each day.

35:18The diversity is our great benefit because if we had just remained as a manufacturing and design studio, we would be a small bureau in New Zealand. But the beauty of the diversity means that if one division drops off, which invariably is happening pretty much every year, the other divisions all come together to support that division. and it fluctuates and flows. Luckily to this point, we haven't stumbled too heavily, but due to the cleverness of the team and the symbiotic collaboration of the teams to keep each division propped up when times are hard, but it is a reality that the world is changing, the creative environment is changing, and most critically the film industry, specifically the Hollywood film industry, is dramatically changing.

36:14So where film used to make 70 % of our work, it now probably makes 30 % to 40 % of our work. So we'll come back to that because I do find the sort of diversified, not perfectly correlated nature of the company to be very, very interesting. And I do want to ask you about Hollywood changes. But first, Greg, I want to come to you with a very important question related to naked ladies slipping on banana peels. I remember you and I were exchanging messages when I was inspired after my trip, actually, to attempt to learn digital painting. Oh, really? Using Procreate. And I was curious about some of your practice habits and so on.

36:58And I can't remember exactly what prompted you to send this to me. but it was a process capture of you creating many, many, I want to say 50, 60, who knows? 99. 99. 99. 99 dodgy slips. Dodgy slips. Okay. So Greg, can you explain, and this will go somewhere, can you explain how that came to be? What the hell are we talking about? Yes. So do you remember the DS? What was the DS stand for? It was a Nintendo DS. It was a little flip over game console, right? It was made for video games. But the cool thing that Nintendo added was a touchscreen. It was just hand, actually it had a stylus, I think. That's right.

37:43What they didn't tell anyone was that it actually had pressure sensitivity. I guess they just didn't include that feature. But I was playing that a lot and found that someone had made an app, a mod for it, that made it into a little art app and actually utilized the pressure sensitivity. And that was the first handheld, like now they're everywhere, these little phones and so on with Procreate on your iPad and so on. But back then, a little game console, you could actually draw pictures on it. And then this guy is a Swedish guy, Jens, I can't remember his surname, but he made a little program for it, utilized the pressure sensitivity.

38:13And I just started drawing on it. And actually it happened, it would have been Christmas time in New Zealand, while my partner Kate was going out shopping for Christmas presents and going into every store, I sat outside, bored to tears. I would just flip open my DS and start drawing. And I like drawing figures. I like drawing people. And I don't like drawing from life very much. I like drawing from my imagination. I just started drawing women falling over on banana peels. It's a very 1950s comic book kind of idea of slipping on the banana peel and breaking your neck. And every single one of them provides a new opportunity to sort of creatively explore the human body doing interesting things.

38:47I like the stupidity of it, like sort of sexualized, but making fun of it, right? Because it's like, you can't be that sexy when you're falling over and hurting yourself. I don't know what's going on about that clash. It's interesting to me. But not a peel flying in the air. But I drew them and actually I hit 99 and we made an exhibition called 99DS with my friend Christian Pierce that Richard and Tanya were the patron of. And we put on an exhibition in town. But it was called 99 because I hit 99 drawings. And that was when Jen's operating system in his game, in his program that allowed you to draw, that's when they hit the file limit.

39:21So it's like, well, I've done 99. I would have gone to 500. And so I hit 99 and I thought, well, that's that. And so my friend, so 99 dodgy slips from 99 DS. And my friend Christian, he did 99. What did he do? He did deadly sleds. Deadly sleds, these really cool, super creative hot rods in all different ways. Anyway, that's where that came from. And for some reason, that ludicrous idea, Richard decided, yeah, it's a great idea for an exhibition. I'll put it on in town. So thank you, Richard. Yeah, we put it on inside. We got two shipping containers, painted them white, put a massive graphic of DS99 on the side of them.

39:57And then I had our engineers cut a hole through the insides of the shipping containers so you could walk from one to the other and then line them in white malteca so they look like a medical laboratory and put LED strip lighting and so on. And then we printed every image of Greg's and Christian's off about this big. and we hung them along the wall like this and they looked so amazing. And one container was dodgy slips and the other container was deadly sleds. Rhi, would you mind just going to Tanya's wall and behind the door is a poster of deadly sleds? Just take it off if you can. I'll just show you what they actually are.

40:42I unfortunately can't hang Greg's dodgy slips on the wall of our office. They are hung in the design room in a lovely collection. Yeah, there's a bit of nudity. And none of the girls are well-groomed, if that's the right way to put it. And so people did query me about that. It's not the modern way to leave. It's not the modern way. I don't know what to say without getting you in trouble on YouTube. Oh, you're not going to get in trouble. So, Greg, I do want to, while we're awaiting the arrival of my toys. Oh, here it is. It's just here. I'll show it to you quickly. So this is Christian's work, not Greg's work.

41:19So you see, there's the graphic, 99 deadly sleds, and there's a lovely thing that Christian's written to Tanya that's faded. But you can see the level at which they can be illustrated on this tiny little wall. That's wild. That is just incredible. Yeah. Yeah, the guy that did it did an amazing job, amazing job that you could make this little Nintendo make a beautiful little art app, right? It was incredible. In fact, other people made all kinds of things for it, animation, stop motion animation apps and so on, which I played with and made little animations. And that guy, Jen, I can't remember his surname, but he was so lovely.

41:55I wrote to him to say, you know, actually I wanted to export the images larger because they came out of this tiny little file size, tiny little resolution. And so he made an image to a little program to upscale the images because it actually records all the pen stroke paths. And then he made us a little thing that did a process animation of it, like showed each brushstroke going down because that was recorded as well. And that is the video. That's what happened. That I saw. Yeah. Amazing. So now you have an amazing bio, Greg, and I want to get to the two week trial that started this whole dynamic duo.

42:30Yeah. So we're going to get to that. Now, if you could just refresh my memory, I believe that you learned your skills through private tutors given to you by your aristocratic parents and then art finishing school at the finest institutions. Am I remembering correctly? How did you learn your trade?

42:51That is a good question. Yeah, I did try and do art school. Richard, did you try and do art school? Yeah, I went through polytech. You did go through polytech. I tried to go to New Zealand's most prestigious art school and they turned me down. So I tried another one and they turned me down. In the end, I went to an art college in a small town in New Zealand, but it didn't last very long. I think For a little while, they didn't know what to do with me, so they put me off campus in a little room, and I was happy. I was like I bought bed sheets and acrylic paint and would just paint these weird Salvador Dali tortured scenes of people.

43:25And I was happy, and I thought, well, this is what school is. This is great. I'm just going to do all these paintings. And then very quickly, they got me back again and found out what they wanted to do with me, which was make me learn all the traditional things you're supposed to do in art and so on. And I was a young punk rocker. but I didn't want anyone to tell me what to do, and I still don't. So I was immediately out of my element and thought, this is not for me. I don't want to learn perspective and blah, blah, blah. Actually now, in retrospect, I wish I had learned perspective and all these fundamentals, but I just wanted to learn myself, and I find that I love learning by doing.

43:58It's the only way. The act of illustrating or being creative in general, I find most interesting when you don't actually know where you're going exactly and you don't know what you're – you don't really know how to do it. You just throw yourself into it and do your best. And I love that process, sort of finding out the shortcuts. I find the least interesting, if you like. I feel like I don't learn out of that. I learn just by constant failing towards success, if you like, building up. The failures stack up, and luckily you end up seeing the horizon from that. Can I just say, he's not been self-effacing there.

44:28That's literally how he works. I know it might seem to people listening that, oh, you must never fail. you did all these incredible films and your body of work is so amazing. But it's extraordinary watching Greg work because he almost massages the object out of the canvas, right? By playing with it, by adjusting it, shifting it. Very, very different way to what a lot of people do. And I give briefs to Greg almost daily. And there's things that I assume entirely that Greg will be When you say brief, is that a project description? Yeah, a project description. Like here's a great example right next to me.

45:10I needed a set of lockers designed for our Unleashed locker where you lock up your bags when you go through Unleashed. And Greg, there's the wall. There's a photograph of the lockers. And Greg has designed a set of characters, right, on the lockers. So you don't remember a locker number. You remember the character that you got, and then he's made this sign for the top of the lockers, right? That's a great example I just happened to have next to me because that's a discussion we're having today. But there's things I totally assume that Greg's just going to knock out of the park and he'll just say, no, I won't be able to do that.

45:48I wouldn't be able to get a result for you because the way I organically work and think can't yield something. things. So he's very honest with me so we don't waste money and time. Other things that seem so challenging, two hours later, he'll fire back a sketch and he's nailed it. Absolutely. And it's very rare that I will go back to Greg and say, could you please do X, Y, and Z? I might scale things. I might ask for a bit more absurdity in the picture. I gave him a brief, imagine an alien vomiting creativity across the walls of Auckland. That was the brief. That's ended up being one of the world's largest murals, consisting of dozens of crazy characters rolling through brain vomit of creativity, right?

46:40And Greg nailed it in the first illustration. It did take me 10 weeks to then censor it so it could be seen by the general public. I was in a total flow state with that, by the way, which is what I love to do. You know, you like to fall into the image and not even think about it, just create it. And it sort of just happens. And so you're trying to find this flow state. And so I was just doing this illustration. It's 60 meters long by six meters high. I'm doing it on Photoshop, but in pencils. And I'm doing it. And it's only, it feels like at the end is when I woke up and then the image was done.

47:12Even though this actually took weeks and weeks. How do you set the conditions such that that flow state is more likely to happen? What do you have? Do you have any rituals? Are there any patterns that you can spot in retrospect that seem to contribute to that? I'm 53 this year, and I still don't know. I would ask you that. I remember this artist, Josh Homme. He's a guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age. An amazing guy. And he actually just says, you've just got to work. He thinks of it as the muse, and the muse is out there. The muse is the universe, right? And it's hopefully going to offer you creativity.

47:47Richard is just dangling. He's a robot butt. These are characters out of the mural, right? I just want to reinforce the total absurdity of the way Greg's brain works.

48:01But Josh says that, you know, that thing out there, the flow state, the muse, the magic of creativity, whatever it is, is out there. And it's good to think of it as external to yourself because that's what it feels like when it comes to you and it comes to you in a powerful way. The only way is just to make yourself available to it, which is work, right? It's just turning up. That's why we turn up every day and we work all day, right? And you just do the work and then hopefully it turns up. Is there a magic trick to make it happen more? I think anything that works, it removes yourself somehow.

48:30It makes you fall away. Like I said, when I did the mural, the best parts of it were where I felt like I woke up at the end and it was done. And that was actually where Richard was pointing out where all the problems came from. Because I wasn't conscious during half of it, if you like, there were things in there that were problematic. I'd broken IP. I'd put Lemmy from Motorhead in it because I love Lemmy. And I just wasn't thinking. And Richard said at the end, you know, we don't own Lemmy, right? So I ended up chopping Lemmy's head off. And what did you do in its place? And I put Richard's head on.

49:00Richard said, why don't you put your head on? And I'm like, no, I'm putting Richard's head on. Anyway, but it's full of those kind of problems that Richard had to point out to me that were like, hey, you've done this and you've done this. And I'm like, oh, really? Have I? God, I didn't realize. But that's the flow state. That's the muse. That's like the fact that it really didn't feel like it was me doing it. It just happened. So how did this start off? How did the two-week trial happen? I started during the post-production of Lord of the Rings. So I think most of the actual creative work that I could have been involved with was actually already done.

49:31But Richard was about to start on King Kong. I think Peter had brought up King Kong. And also Evangelion. Remember, that never happened. It was a live-action movie of Evangelion proposed. and I sent in a folio with dinosaurs and robots in it and Richard saw it. And I actually did a comic book as well that had both of those things. And so Richard must have gone like, oh, that person looks like they can do something. But I had never worked before. I'd been unemployed for like seven or eight years before that, almost continuously on the dole, which is not something I recommend. And so I had no idea about working professionally or doing anything like that.

50:06I'm just a sort of creative lost soul, actually. But when I saw that there was a place that was, I saw the first Lord of the Rings film come out and it was like, you know, I was a fan of Peter Jackson's work and everything, but my mind was utterly blown. I was not prepared for the scale, how good it really was and how it transported me. But then I realized, oh, there's this place in Wellington and I'm living here and it's got these crazy creative people. Maybe, please, maybe I could work there. So the timing was perfect. Having that folio with some of the things that piqued Richard's interest.

50:36And Richard was so generous. He brought me in a couple of weeks after seeing my folio and showed me around. And I just said, so when do I start? And Richard was very gracious and said, well, you can come on in next week or whatever. And I sort of thought I was on a – I think I got a two-week contract after a while. And I think I'm still on that two-week contract, Richard. You just have to renew your vows every two weeks. So I constantly think I'm two weeks away from being out of a job. And I like that. So I'm very curious, Greg, as Richard was mentioning earlier, sometimes you'll get a brief and you'll say, sorry, no can do.

51:14This is not something I deliver. And then other times, something that Richard would think to be very complex gets turned around in two hours. And what I'm curious about in the former category, how do you know when something just is not in your wheelhouse? house or how do you decide to respond with that type of answer where you're like, can't do it, can't deliver this one? I don't know. I'd have to probably see an example because I can't remember actually saying no. I always sit there. I guess here is what it is. If Richard or anyone asked me for something, if my brow really starts furrowing and won't unfurrow, then I know this isn't going to work.

51:55I used to describe Greg as getting pinwheels in his eyes, right? His eyes would just pinwheel like this. And I go, this one's not for Greg. Tim, when I started listening to your podcast, the first one I listened to, or actually I listened to one years ago and I absolutely loved it. But then I came back, I listened to one of David Deutsch in Naval. Sure. Oh, yeah. Right? And the David Deutsch one just blew my mind. I'm reading his books at the moment. I've become absolutely obsessed with him. There's something in his philosophy and his science that I totally resonate with. It's not like I've changed my opinion.

52:29It's like amplified my opinion. And he talks about really finding the fun, chasing the fun. You know, it's about finding really what inspires you, what interests you. And then when that feeling happens, you know you're going to be able to solve that problem or you have a chance of solving that problem because you're motivated, you're interested. And finding that state of fun and creativity is the perfect way to learn. You're motivated to learn and you'll overcome the challenges. Maybe when things are a little bit too hard, they're not fun, you know, when they're too easy, you know, you've already done it before.

53:02There's no point doing that again. And I get bored very easily. So the things that I've already done before, I'd be like, why do that? Let AI do that, you know. AI's already been trained on that. That's fine. It can solve that problem. I want to solve the problem where it's fun. And so there's the things that Richard will suggest, and this is 90 % of them, in my opinion, I hope so, Richard, I get excited. My brain ignites and then I go like, I want to solve on that. And maybe, and I can't think of an example, there's the chance, hopefully, very few states where I go like, I just go, I don't know why that would work.

53:32But I would also try and say why I think it doesn't work or why I can't solve it. And maybe even suggest why it shouldn't be solved and could be solved a different way. I always try and be constructive. Greg will always philosophise with me around art, right? It's one of the great benefits of our friendship, irrelevant of our working relationship, in that trying to find the purity of an idea requires a level of philosophical exploration. It doesn't have to be highbrow by any means. I don't think me and Greg are capable of highbrow. But it does require you looking inside yourself, and it does require a deep, observational, inquisitive journey through an idea together.

54:20And we do that amongst a small group of senior creatives within the building. It's actually, to me, one of the most joyful parts of my career is that those conversations through relationship around creativity and what comes out of the end of them, which is really great. Richard, could you give an example that comes to mind, any example of what that looks like in practice, what it looks like coming in and then what it looks like at the end of such a conversation? And for people listening, I'm sure they're like, that sounds awesome, but what does it look like? How can I try it? I'd do a real meta example of it.

54:59So we know that we want to own and operate our own location-based experience because we're building them for other people. We don't really have an inkling to try and make a movie, but we know that we want to do something that's our own IP of our own experience. So how does the seed of the idea come to be? We've built an exhibition in downtown Wellington in our National Museum called Gallipoli, the Scale of Our War. I saw it. Great. It tells the story of a First World War campaign fought by New Zealanders, relatively what would appear to a foreign visitor a relatively modest moment in history, but to New Zealand a phenomenally important moment in the journey of our country, et cetera.

55:49And it's through that level of philosophical exploration that you come up with the seed of the idea. And I call it the grand idea. If you can't come up with the grand idea, then you're almost certainly not going to be able to achieve something that will engage the audience. It's like trying to make a movie before the script's written. With Gallipoli, myself and my colleague Rick came up with the grand idea in the first three hours that we sat together because we philosophized around what Gallipoli meant to the people in New Zealand, what the men must have felt, what the realities of the situation.

56:30The next exhibition that we did for the same client, which they said, we want to build an exhibition around bugs. What was the great idea for Gallipoli? Like, what did you land on? The great idea is the realization that most people only think of a past military conquest as visualised and quickly fading memories through sepia-coloured photographs of a time-long past of people that no longer matter. That's sadly fact, right? And most museum exhibitions of military campaigns are told through statistics, told through the army, told through a meta-like view down on the war. Our grand idea, if you can call it that, is make pillars of the men of our past and present them in a hyper-realistic, larger-than-life scale in bell jars to give people the opportunity to learn the story of the whole campaign through the intimacy of the connection to eight people, seven soldiers and one nurse.

57:42And that was the grand idea and the technique of achieving that. Going back to Unleashed, the LBE that we've built in Auckland, the location-based experience in Auckland, we oscillated around the idea for a year. Sorry, I should have finished off. BugLab was a five-month deadline as opposed to the eight months that we had to do Gallipoli. Three months in to BugLab, we still didn't have the grand idea. So we won't start until we have the grand idea, right? So it's very, very perilous and puts you on the very edge of potential failure because you are trying to find that grand idea. But without it, the work is a waste of time because it doesn't congeal around a central conceit.

58:34And with Unleashed, it took us a year of exploratory ideation and philosophical discussion until we landed on the incredibly obvious, but the thing that we really, really wanted to do in the story we wanted to tell. That's a good example at a large scale. But that stuff is happening most days of the week as well on micro decision making. Can I just add some color to that? Because you brushed over it really quickly that they're huge sculptures. Most exhibitions of war, as Richard says, or even history in general. This is for Gallipoli. Yeah, really, they're either dioramas, small, or recreations of soldiers at real scale and lots of photos and lots of documentation, right?

59:22And then you're kind of supposed to pour through the documentation. Sometimes they have a little bit of audio and video. But this is these huge people, hyper-realistic. because it'd be like down to the pores, like every - I remember looking at the pores when I first walked in. Right, the sweat pouring down their brow. The sweat and the pores and the hair and the eyebrows. A man picking up food. How large are these figures? Two and a half times life size. Massive. The biggest that we've built at hyper-realism is eight times life size. So that's a 16 meter tall figure, if they were to stand, right?

59:54One and a half kilometers of fabric in their garments. Even the fabric is scaled up, right? Right. Everything is scaled up. People are complimentary about the heads and the hands because they can rationalise that to their own skin and how we've scaled it up. The challenges of making the heads and the hands pales compared to making the different fabrics and components within the costuming. Because to make a larger costume, you have to find a sheep with a two and a half times larger denier of hair density to what was used for the real costume. And then you've got to weave it. You've got to loom it and then weave it and then build it into costume.

1:00:40Then you can't just use a sewing machine because the stitching won't be big enough and on and on and on it goes. So we want to tackle it at that level. Some listening may go, oh God, that just seems either obsessive or a waste of money and time. We take it to that degree because you are trying to pay a depth of respect to the memory of the people. And if you shortchange the effort, you've shortchanged the respect to those people. These are veterans, right? They're returned servicemen or men that lost their lives in service to our country. So what is it to us to make that extra 10 % to try and get it as good as we can possibly get it?

1:01:23A lovely thing with Gallipoli is over 4 million people have been through it now. Now, that may not seem a great number to people listening, but that's in a population of only 5 million people. We're very proud of Gallipoli. It's just been extended by a few more years, so it means more people can get to see it. And Tim, when you experienced it, but when you stand there under the people, it is a different, it's very, very different. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. I didn't make it, so I can kind of hype it a little bit. I think I just got to wonder it as well and sit there beneath these giant men and characters.

1:02:01And you feel, because they're hyper real and the beautiful way it's all presented and lit, you feel a magnitude, right? Literally, but emotionally, that's a very unusual approach. If you, I think that idea on paper, hey, we'll make giant versions of these figures. It almost seems kind of weird and surreal, but it has an emotional impact that makes you feel the situation profoundly. Yeah. Richard, did I hear you correctly? You said the deadline was eight months on that. Yeah, we had eight months from the first meeting with the board. I did not know that. Wow. Very few things we do has the luxury of time.

1:02:36So it could be argued if someone took an in-depth look in our company that it does not make good business and financial sense to carry the level of infrastructure that we do at a manufacturing level. We have 11 different divisions doing 17 different disciplines under the one roof. And so you've got experts that are poised and ready to go. The reason for that, other than the fact we just love having that type of expertise and creativity along for the ride, is that we simply could not simply do many of the jobs that we do because the inability to turn on a dime, to react that quickly. It's very rare that we will do a film job that has more than eight weeks.

1:03:29Very rare. Has more than eight weeks, you said? More than eight weeks, yeah. We've literally just done a job over Christmas that saw us deliver hundreds of, I think, over a thousand weapons and hundreds of suits of armor in less than eight weeks. So that comes down to innovating new methodology and having process. Obviously, all the other things, passion, enthusiasm, tenacity, everything that comes along with a great crew of people, but being able to innovate new methodologies every year to be able to stay ahead of the deadline, basically. Yeah. So let me ask a question about process and then we're going to come back to you, Greg.

1:04:16But first I do want to talk about, because this certainly is so iconic and it's in the minds of probably most people listening, which is Lord of the Rings. And I'd like to understand what some of the most, first of all, kind of how that came to be Richard, and then what some of the most crucial decisions were with respect to taking on a project of that scope? Because for a lot of companies, I could see that being the hug of death, where you suddenly go from reasonably moderately contained and small to sprawling, taking on so much responsibility. And many companies would implode. I've seen it happen many, many times.

1:05:01So how did that come to be? And what were some of the most important decisions made that allowed you to grow the company and take that on? Yeah, that's a really big question. I'll try and answer it in a very condensed way. We have time. I just pulled this out, right? This is Sting from the movie. This is one of my favorite things that we've made in the company. And I keep it next to me and I pick it up and it gives you strength and it gives you a sense of wonder and it connects you back to a very happy time and it glows if there are challenging clients in the corridor. For people who can't see that, that is a sword.

1:05:45Yeah. Oh, sorry. Those that can't see it here, I'm showing all these visual aids because that's how I think. I'll drive people to the video. I just held up the 1.48 eight times larger than life-size sting that's carried by Elijah Wood at his scale. I likened it to teetering towards the edge of a precipice. There's probably a much better visual metaphor than this. And you do this frequently in one's life, the decision to start a family, the decision to buy your first home or the home that you'll spend the rest of your life in, like the home that my wife and I bought way back on Meet the Feebles, right?

1:06:29The decision to X, Y, and Z. But Peter Jackson offers this opportunity. And when he offered it, my wife and I, Tanya and I, discussed with Peter, and we ultimately settled on doing the design for and the manufacturing of the armor, weapons, creatures, miniatures, special makeup effects and prosthetics. like five divisions, a very, very large body of work. And you teeter to the edge of the precipice. And as a human, just as the human animal that we are, you've got a decision. You either step back from the edge and let others take up the slack and do it for you and you follow, or you choose to leap.

1:07:17And you either will then slam into the bottom of the cliff and make a mess with your guts and your brains everywhere. or you will actually arrest your fall through a number of different mechanisms, self-belief being the most important one. I have four very simple tenants that I operate by and four tenants that I try and operate our company by, and the first one is love of oneself. That doesn't mean that you're egotistical or believe that you're better than you are, but if you can't see in yourself your virtues, How the hell are you going to expect anyone else following you to see your virtues, right?

1:07:59So love of oneself is the first of those four tenets. And there is mixed with that, as corny as it sounds, ignorance being your greatest ally. I think all of us operate to some degree where we are blinded by the love of what we do. like Bertram Russell, if I've got the right person, has a lovely quote, work is more fun than fun. And people that don't understand that struggle. Even if you're in a low-level position that you're not really enjoying, you can still make the people that you work with really fun, right? I used to clean toilets on international airplanes, but man, the people I worked with, I put a cricket ball through the window of the international terminal because we were playing cricket out on the tarmac under the plains.

1:08:57You can turn anything into fun. So I had, once again, a very corny and I couldn't think of something better at the time. but we needed 158 crew working for seven and a half years on 48 ,000 separate things to deliver those five divisions to the trilogy of movies. Our work's in 98 % to 99 % of the films because our work's in almost every image shot other than mountains with no one in it or et cetera. And you've got an inexperienced crew. You're highly inexperienced yourself, right? We'd done Hercules and Xena at the time, and we'd had a career of about eight to 10 years doing Peter's films. Peter, of course, is an inspiration in his own right and highly knowledgeable, so he's helping as well.

1:09:52I used to say, no matter how fine and how pale the thread that I give you, if you don't weave it with care into the tapestry, the tapestry will be in some way threadbare. What I'm talking about, that's sort of more of a silly poetic way to say you're only as good as your weakest link. And in our case, we literally were linking, right? Handmade chainmail, 12.5 million links over three and a half years. And chainmail is only as good as how well you glue the top link on your shoulder and whether the chain mail is going to fall off you. So trying to get us collectively, myself and my wife and our team, to believe that we could do it didn't require, because there is a, I'm sure it exists in other countries, but it is a fundamental part of New Zealand.

1:10:47I think it's because we're a young nation. We're at the back quarters of the world, a long way from marketplaces where you can buy components to fix your tractor. So there is this intense can-do attitude that still exists today, thankfully. We hire people that come with that beautiful can-do attitude, and we were able to benefit and bottle that so significantly on those three films. And the overjoyed nature of knowing that you're trying to prove something, prove that New Zealand could do it, that we could stamp our mark on the world stage. That was really important to us. To do justice to Tolkien's writing was really important to us.

1:11:34To meet Peter Jackson's vision was really important. And to make sure that we had really good fun. That didn't mean that it wasn't brutally challenging. It was. But at no point in the seven and a half years did I ever think that I didn't want to be doing it. That was really a special part of that experience. Work is more fun than fun. What are the other tenets you mentioned for? Love of oneself, love of what you do, love of who you do it with, and love of who you do it for. That is as a father of a family, well, as a husband or partner to a loved one, a father or mother to a family, a president of a country, a CEO of a business.

1:12:24If you can't find those four tenants, obviously the first one, love of yourself, love of what you do. You've got to love being a parent. You've got to love being a lover, a husband, a wife, a partner. You have to love the people that you do it for. It is so easy to become cynical about your audience or your fans or your family or the person working above you, right? But that's who you're trying to catch it up in your passion for what you do. And the other one's very obvious. So that's how I think of things very simply. And that's after 30 plus years of working, it started to congeal that that's thinking about all these things that you might think about.

1:13:12That's the things that drive you forward. I think I've settled on those four simple and try not to be a dickhead is maybe the fifth. There are thousands of self-help books. I've actually only read one of them. I can't remember the title even. But someone said to me once, you only need one page, a one-page book on self-help, and it's simply, and there's only one line, and it just says, just don't be a dickhead, right? And if you put that against almost anything in life, it's actually correct if we understand collectively what being a dickhead means. And no doubt I fall foul of that and invariably am sometimes.

1:14:00You know, we all are. We can't. It's very hard to not be. But you try really hard not to be. Hey, Greg. Yeah. Yeah. Trying. Always. I'm trying. Have I answered your question well enough? I've sort of been a bit fringed around the outsides of it. No, you did. I'll have probably just one or two follow-ups related to that. But before I get to that, you mentioned the can-do attitude of a fairly remote country and the resourcefulness that that engenders. And I'm wondering if there are any other advantages that you can think of, of doing this, whether it's the workshop or Lord of the Rings or the combination of the two in New Zealand.

1:14:40Are there advantages that you can think of? Tim when I'm talking I'm talking about Wedder Workshop we were a small component of the overarching endeavour of making Lord of the Rings we're very proud of the piece we played and we did a lot on it but the art department, the costuming department the props department, the camera department, the grips department the directing department etc etc the miniatures there was a phenomenal number of people all focused on the same mission And I've actually said in the past, Lord of the Rings wasn't made by a director. It wasn't made by a film studio. It wasn't made by a film crew.

1:15:21It was made by a nation of people coming together in that moment to try and make Lord of the Rings in New Zealand for the world. That speaks to the phenomenal number of people that Peter and his producer drew into the collaboration of making Lord of the Rings. I mean, the government, the military, the whole country was behind it. The government, the military, our tourism department, I think everyone felt you would have to have been pretty cynical at the time to have not felt a certain level of pride in what Peter was trying to do in our country and get behind it. and a lot of people benefited because of it.

1:16:02The driving desire to that term punch above your weight, I don't specifically like that term, but that's a well-used one that speaks to it. New Zealanders do have a burning desire to try and achieve great things regardless of where we may come from and the scale of our country. That should not restrict you at all And you only need to look at our sports teams to see that, whether it's our national ballet, orchestra, contemporary dance, poets, writers, painters, artists in general, never mind the film industry or the creative industries. We have technology companies in New Zealand that are competing with the best in the world.

1:16:47Rocket Lab comes to mind that are doing astounding things on a fraction of the budget. The robots that we're building in our workshop right now, probably at a 500th to a thousandth of the investment cost of some of the robots that we're seeing online, but we're pulling it off. We're getting there slowly, but getting there with five people and the money that we can save from projects we're doing. It's that attitude. I think that plays a big part of it. Peter Jackson mustn't be missed in this equation too. his self-belief and his just sheer drive. I've never ever seen Peter quiver in uncertainty, to fluctuate in a sense of uncertainty that he isn't sure of what he's doing.

1:17:39That is an amazing thing to work around because if your leader's confident, then, you know, And there's a lovely quote, the emperor will not remember you for your medals or your diplomas. He will only remember you for your scars. And I think there is a mentality of that very much in our country. You just got to knuckle down and do it, right? Grit is an important component in the journey, not the accolades at the end. It's the task of getting there that is seen as equal in accomplishment as winning baubles. Quick follow-up on never seeing Peter fluctuate in uncertainty. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

1:18:27Is it because, in your perception, he's very clear on the right thing to do? And or is he also very good at identifying things that can be fixed later? In other words, he moves very quickly and values fast decision-making with incomplete information over trying to get complete information. I don't know if that's a coherent question, but could you expand a bit on why you think he's able to do that? It's a hard question because not to be disingenuous in any way to Peter, because he is an extraordinary human being, a filmmaker, et cetera. But of course, he makes mistakes. He leads things possibly in a challenging way.

1:19:11I'm not actually speaking to the outcome as much as the sense of self-belief and confidence that he's got it, that he knows what's right for him and he knows where to go with it. And maybe others have seen him, but I've, as close as I've had the pleasure of working with him at times through my career, I've not walked into a meeting, which I do in front of my own colleagues here at the workshop. I'll go, guys, you know, with this one, I'm not completely sure where we should go with this. Could we talk it through? Could we philosophize on it? Could we? Peter doesn't need to do that. He'll come to us and say, I can't yet visualize it.

1:20:02I know what I want to do with it, but I don't know what it's going to look like yet. Could you do some concept art around it? But the conviction of how he's going to actually make the images on the screen is so certain. I think a lot of that is his self-education and what he has taught himself about most of the ways film is made. If he had a thousand years, he could have made Lord of the Rings himself. So my assistant, Ria, is just trying to catch my eye to let me know. No problem. Do you have to exit stage left? I've got to bug out very quickly. Sorry. Okay. No problem. No problem at all. Do we have time for 60 seconds?

1:20:45One last quick question? Okay. Yeah, of course. So Richard, you mentioned creating creators, making makers, and also inspiring kids. And I'm curious, for people listening, if they wanted to be more creative to lay their 10 digits into making something, are there any resources, books, exercises, anything you'd suggest they start with? Obviously, today with the internet, there's a near infinite source of extraordinary training videos. I'm doing some sculpting of my own at home at the moment. And while I'm sculpting, I just have a video playing, not that I can watch the video because I'm sculpting, but just listen to a guy that's talking through doing his own sculpture, right?

1:21:28Because I just love to think that maybe there's a sculptor standing next to me. And so I've been inspired by that. But in answer to your question, to me, the core attribute of creativity is to be inquisitive, to be curious. And I do see that a lot of people choose to journey through life looking at the world, but not studying the world. They don't find beauty and curiosity in the simplest of things. And if you find it in yourself to start finding extraordinary lessons and beauty and inspiration in most, if not everything around you, specifically the simplest things. Like there was that great American movie that came out with Annette Bening with the dancing plastic bag that was caught in the wind.

1:22:27Oh, is that American Beauty maybe? That's right. We've all seen bits of plastic caught in the eddies of a lufting wind in the corner of a building or in a rubbish bin or whatever. But that director remembered it, captured it and shared it because his inquisitive mind loved it. And it became like my mind has instantly gone to that image when I've been trying to visualize how to answer your question because it resounded so fundamentally with me. and then there's only one thing that you can do is just start making. It doesn't matter what the medium is. We have people turn up to interview with me and you can see that they're slightly bashful and I say, well, what do you do?

1:23:15And they will go, well, I do macrame or as you guys call it, macrame, I think. Well, macrame is about hand skills, dexterity, eye-to-hand coordination, pattern, weaving, colour combinations, strength, engineering, etc., etc., all these things add up. That person is possibly exactly someone that we'd want to hire. And it doesn't matter what the craft is, just start making something, leave something behind, right? If you think about who are the true immortals in the world, they're teachers and parents, people that pass information to others to carry on into the next generation. But I do think about artists as craftspeople as being creatively immortal.

1:24:05Like, this is not a prop. This is an artifact to me because it will carry on and bring joy long after I'm dead. The sword maker that made that imbued it with creative immortality. And to me, that's a good place to be as a human. Rhi is losing her way. Thank you, Rhi. Thank you, Rhi. Thank you, Richard. Nice to see you. I show her action of telling me to hurry up.

1:24:38All right, Greg, you and I have lots left to talk about. Well, I'll leave you with Greg now. Give Greg a chance to get a word in after I blabbed for most of this. No, I'm learning. I'm sitting here. I love it, actually. So Greg, let's talk about some of your projects that are, I suppose, Greg projects as much as anything else and how you chose them, why you chose them. And let's begin with vintage-inspired ray guns in 2006. Where did that lead? And then I certainly have questions about more recent projects, but let's start there. Yeah, the ray guns. Well, that's a childhood inspiration. I'm a 50, I was born in 1972, 53, I think.

1:25:24Is that right? Done the maths? Yeah, sounds about right. And I'm a child of Star Wars. But before Star Wars, I remember really fondly the black and white serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers and those things. And so those things are seared into my like four, five, six-year-old mind. And so when, you know, when Star Wars came along, it was like all that stuff in technicolor and high definition and the sound and the music and everything. so there's always been this kind of love for retro science fiction in there and so the ray guns came from that love really of flash gordon but in a way it's not really science fiction science fiction i like to think of is it's actually very clear for people who know about science and know about technology and then speculate on what could happen culturally or you know narratively with those things dr grodbortz and the ray guns was not really about that actually it's a veneer of science fiction right technology and weapons and spaceships but it's actually a satire making fun of our current culture and that culture in that world and also making fun of how science fiction and science in general gets things wrong.

1:26:23How did you decide to do that? And I want you to tell people more about it, but how did you decide to do that? We all have finite time and people listening when they're listening to you and Richard, they're like, good God. I mean, they can't keep track of the number of projects and so on. Certainly the energy is a big piece of that, right? So you find the things that excite you and you focus on that. So you have the fuel in the tank before you necessarily decide on the destinations. But how did you decide to go after that saga specifically and create that? So the first thing you just alluded to, and I said it before, that it really is just that I found that so exciting.

1:27:00I thought about the ray guns and I started painting them and I found it so intriguing. I thought I could draw a thousand ray guns. I could just keep on drawing them, just drawing a ray gun. By the way, a whole world came out of it with characters and everything. but I could just draw a thousand ray guns. Like there's infinite variations. And so creative potential on that just caught me and I would have done it. And I did do it. I did these nine, they're up on my wall over here, these nine illustrations. But really the decision to keep going is Richard. I was very, very lucky. So what happened?

1:27:30Like, how did you tip over that domino of the ray guns? Like what was the germ? Because you alluded to it, right? But it's always interesting to me when you end up with like an immersive world, where did it start? Right. So. Maybe you could tell that story. That's Richard fanning the flames. I had done these nine paintings just for myself because I love ray guns. Ray guns. I put them on the wall. Ray guns, yeah. 1930s style classic ray guns. There's something beautiful and arcane about them that I really love and silly at the same time. But Richard, just as King Kong was finishing and Richard, one of the businesses we have is collectibles.

1:28:04But we don't own any of the IP that we make collectibles from generally. And so Richard had this aspiration like, and when you don't own the IP, right, you don't really control it. You don't get to do the exciting things you'd really want to do with it. You've got to go through the filtering process of whoever owns the IP or whoever manages it. And you don't necessarily make the lion's share of the money. So, you know. Sure. So Richard wanted to do our own IP. So he put the word out to the entire workshop and said, we'd love to, has anyone got any creative ideas for collectibles? You know, and I was doing those ray guns.

1:28:32So it was perfect timing. I was like, Richard, we should make these ray guns. Look at that. And luckily for me, he got the idea straight away. He saw it and we almost said the same thing at the same time. we should make these as real. They'll be metal. They've got glass, right? They'll be in a case, right? We'll just pretend they're real. They will be real as far as we're concerned. I had this vision that like, we'd even put, cover them in dust and put moths in there, right? And they are all stained in age. We didn't go as far as putting the moths and the dust on. You make them dusty and old and then you put them in your loft or whatever so that you can pull them out and say, look, this was granddad's Reagan.

1:29:06He fought in the Martian Wars right back in the day. So it was just this philosophy of doing that. And luckily, because Richard got it, before I even knew it, we were away and making them, really making them as real collectibles. And then the next step was provocation from Richard. I love comic books and it made them my whole life. And he said, well, what's this world about? I know you've got these beautiful ray guns, but who made them? And so I'm like, I think I know who made them. And I just started making the books from there. So it went from ray guns to inventor of the ray guns. And then what came after that?

1:29:38I think that to me, there's something in that creativity. The first spark, you don't really know where it comes from. Maybe it comes from your childhood or something random that you've picked up along the way and that just ignites your information. But then if you've created all these sort of why questions to start coming from it. So if you've got these Reagans, who made them? Why did they make them? What are they for? And your imagination starts presenting answers to that, right? And then you just, I think about this a lot. Why choose any creative direction? This is a whole big metaphysical thing.

1:30:07I think about a lot about there's actually two different ways, I think, two distinct directions in which people create stories and narratives and worlds. And one way is directed where you kind of know where you're going to go. You know the ending. And the other way, which I've discovered I do more often than not, is I am just chasing these why questions, getting your imagination, giving you answers back, and you following with the one that is most profound to you, that makes you feel the most. It must make sense logically to you, but it also must excite you. And then also, I guess, it feels the most powerful, but you can possibly see more branches coming out from there.

1:30:42And as soon as you see the more branches, you're like, that must be the way. And so you're taking all these choices as they pop up and present themselves to you. That world of starting off with a series of nine paintings of ray guns ended up being a whole universe. And we made games from it, made dozens of different collectibles and books and all kinds of things, all from that process of just chasing the right thing and having Richard being the one going like, do more, do more, do more. So I was actually just having a conversation a few weeks ago in Utah with the fiction, mostly fantasy writer, Brandon Sanderson.

1:31:14And he was discussing exactly, in different terms, but these two stylistic options, right? Or creative approaches. And I think, I can't recall exactly the terms he used, but it was something like the improviser and the architect. right? Some people like to have the blueprint, the outline, they execute to outline and that produces what they expected. Other people, let's just say in the realm of fiction writing might start with two characters or one character in an interesting situation and then they just run with it right from there. They start with that germ of an idea and then they see where the tree branches, but they don't know where they're going to end up, which is such a fun and liberating approach, which I've only explored in a little bit of fiction that I've done, but most of the time I'm architecting in terms of nonfiction.

1:32:03I was going to ask. So you're more on that architect side. You can kind of see an endpoint potentially or see the thing you're trying to say. And then it's about like, okay, how do I plan to get there? Well, you know, now that I think about it and I'm thinking it through out loud, I would say that when I'm in the second phase of my work, that's true. And what I mean by that is my books are actually two broad buckets. The first bucket is research and experimentation. And when I'm doing the research and the experimentation, there is a lot of groping in the darkness and finding my way from one interesting thing to the next.

1:32:46So I can't really predict, otherwise it would be very boring, where the experimentation is going to lead for any of the books, which almost always include experimentation, especially the first three and the one that I'm working on right now. And then once I have all of the material, more or less, then I decide how I'm going to pick and choose and massage and create a sort of interwoven puzzle, so to speak. Maybe that's not the right metaphor, but you kind of get the idea, like an advent calendar maybe, for the reader to experience as they go from one page in one chapter to the next and to the next.

1:33:22So I would say that in the beginning, it's exploration, improvising, and it gives me the dopamine hit and the rush of energy necessary so that when I end up having to do the blueprinting and the bricklaying, which I intrinsically find less enjoyable, then I have gas in the tank to push me through that second phase. There's probably not a hard distinction between either. And in fact, you're probably oscillating back and forwards between both approaches all the time to some degree. It's just some people naturally veer more towards exploring and some wanting to know a place. I discovered it a little bit when I was showing the early stage of my current book to a friend and had a character in it and they wanted the character to resolve a certain way, right?

1:34:09And they said, I hope you have this character beat that character. I'm being really reductive, so I'm not being specific. about anything, but they're saying, you know, they hope that happens. And that was the realization for me that I wasn't doing it in the way that they were thinking, because I was really, I was thinking, well, actually, I really, I don't know. I don't know who's going to win. You know, I don't know where it's going to go. I'm just following it and seeing where it goes. Part of that might just be a choice of that feels more fun. That is riding the wave. That's being on the skateboard, not knowing whether you'll fall off or not.

1:34:38If you can keep it fun, then you keep on going. Right. And so not knowing where it's going to go is good, but you know that you're imagination will present you these options and that if it feels powerful, then you know you've hit somewhere good. I think you touched on a key component there, at least for me, which is effectively if you have confidence in your imagination, in the muse also to present you with discoveries along the way, having that confidence seems to be a prerequisite. And I think I've always had quite a lot of self-doubt when it came to taking something from beginning to end idea to final product without a blueprint.

1:35:19And that's part of the reason why I've, in the last few years and moving forward, I want to do many more creative sprints, short deadlines with really capable people where I don't know exactly where the end product is going to end up. And to play around with honing that confidence in more of an improv jazz way, as opposed to a orchestral piece where you have everything figured out in advance and executed to spec. I want to catch on one thing you said there, though, but there is a missing ingredient in that you do need to have the deadline, right? Or the reality, you need to have the wolf at your back to some degree, right?

1:35:59If you're completely creatively open and just going to find your way, but there's no deadline, there's no pressure on you, you can kind of wander anywhere. There is something about like making a commitment to someone else, however you do that, to a publisher, to whatever, or taking money on to do the project and knowing that you have to pay it back or whatever. Right. That wolf at your back is so important. Even if you don't know where you're going to go, because now you have to go somewhere and you have to beat the wolf. So you've got to be careful not to take that away from yourself. I think that can be maybe something I'm speculating, but maybe if you get too successful, that can be dangerous because now you know you can just kind of freely float along and explore.

1:36:37Maybe you find something, maybe you don't. But when you know that failure is an option, you go, well, I can't. I have to. I have to keep on going. I have to solve this. Yeah, for sure. So the new book. Yeah. Tell us about the new book and how you ended up deciding on this as a project to put your energies into. Yeah, that's one part. There it is. Oh, pretty. I have it. It's my first time seeing it. It's my first time seeing it in this form. I saw the early digital way back. But that is gorgeous. It came out really, really good. I'm very, very happy with it. I've gone with a publisher called Mad Cave, who I didn't know before, but they've been fantastic.

1:37:16So I started our game studio. I was one of the few people at WIDA Workshop that had a real keen interest in games, and I wanted to make our own games. And really luckily for us, we partnered up. This guy, Roni Abovitz, came along into our lives who started Magic Leap, a company that makes 3D goggles, like AR goggles. They call them spatial computing. And we started a studio through them. And he was massively supportive of me, even though I'd never made video games before. I had a vision of how to do that, of what I wanted to see. And I understood what he was trying to do. And so we were very lucky that we formed a relationship with him and then made the game studio.

1:37:50And I made a series of games and I'm really proud of them. They were great. They're very pioneering and very challenging. But sadly for us, not that many people saw that Magic Leap only got to a certain level and needed more funding. And then COVID came along. And luckily, Magic Leap managed to limp its way through and is now continuing on, which is great for them. And hopefully they continue to grow and get back to strength. But they were massively punched in the guts. And my whole team was gone almost overnight. It was crushing. All the speculative money, as you know, sucked up at that moment and went into the safe things, which is totally understandable.

1:38:26It went in traditional games and it went into food and all the basics that we actually need when we're in a crisis. But it disappeared from Magic Leap's Endeavor at that time. And so I actually had games halfway through production, some almost entirely finished. Brutal. Yeah, dude, emotional punch in the guts for me. And so we all went home and I actually sat here thinking about, well, what next? And so I handed over reins of the game studio. I didn't really want to make traditional games. I was so in love with making the kind of wild and crazy technological things that Magic Leap was aspiring to do that I kind of went back to basics.

1:39:00I thought I need to go back and do something that I can do on my own. I also discovered about myself that maybe I should take a break from running a big team. It's an amazing thing that someone like Richard can do to have so many people, you know, doing these things. It's an art unto itself. But I realized I needed to get back to basics. And I'm a lover of dinosaurs. I grew up in a very dinosaur-y kind of place in the bush. And so this world of cave women and dinosaurs, it's been in my head for years and it kind of crystallized, it started to crystallize. And sitting here looking out my window at the bush, back at home, away from civilization, as civilization seemed to be falling down a little bit, I had these very primal thoughts of this kind of world and the story started to form around those ideas.

1:39:44And it is very much a cave thing. I felt like I was going back into my cave like a weird little shaman and going to concoct something new. Something I knew I could do more or less on my own as well. A comic book is a beautiful thing because you can do the entire thing yourself. That said, I have two other writers, Andy Lanning and Nick Boshier, who co-authored it with me. And they really helped me to sort of shape it and put a lot more depth into it. But to your point, you knew that it couldn't be taken away, in a sense. And I thought, I can do this. I don't need to hire 20 people to do this. I can do this all on my own.

1:40:16And emotionally, it became a story about technology and about collapse and about, you know, being back to basics. I think going from such a technological world, working with Magic Leap, who are doing the most highfalutin crazy stuff, and thinking about that every day, about what the future of computing could be, to like, no, I'm going to work on dinosaurs and blood and gore and people living at the edge of survival. Yeah, that's what really motivated it. What was the set of tools that you used when you were originally concepting this and working on layout and so on? Were you doing the majority of it in Photoshop?

1:40:50What did the set of tools look like? I tend to draw first, mainly in pencil, and then go into Photoshop from there if it's interesting. But the first thing was really conversations. I would be having conversations with my co-authors, just bouncing back. And it was really just percolating ideas in the broadest possible sense of everything that could happen, why the world would be the way it was and everything and all the ingredients. And then some idea really catches your mind and I can see a spark of it, see a little vision. And then it's like, okay, I'm going to draw that. I'm going to draw that moment.

1:41:22And then I started drawing a bunch of those moments that some of them went on to become key plot points in the story. And other things are more matter of fact of like, well, I know there's a character. It's named One Path after this character called One Path. And so I needed to see her. You know, your mind's kind of searching around for who she really is. So that's an exercise into itself. I need to draw her. Normally in a film that would be conceptual design, you might draw a hundred versions of her. but for me luckily because I'm creating it I just like draw one drawing and I know that's her you know yeah and in doing that for all of the elements of the story doing that for all the dinosaurs the places the characters so I essentially concepted it all out I don't need to be as methodical and full as you would with a film because in a film you know you need to design every single thing in every single place because it's going to go on and someone's going to actually have to build it but in this case I know I'm going to be drawing all the comic panels so there's a lot I can fill in in the future that I'll solve when I get to it.

1:42:16But I wanted to draw a high level of it and see it in front of me and get that feeling of like, is this a place? Is this actually a thing? That drawing it all and spending the time with it gives you a chance to live in it and feel, does it make sense? And do you want to move further into it? Do you want to explore more? What are the best places for people to visit? Or maybe a better way to phrase the question is, how can people get a taste of your artwork and storytelling? That certainly includes one path. So you can give people an idea of where and when they will be able to get that. But also if they want to get a taste for the many flavors of Greg Broadmoor, I don't know, wording's a little awkward, but you get the idea.

1:42:58Where should they go? I've just actually released a new website at long, long last, gregbroadmoor.com. My partner made it for me. I've always just relied on Blogspot and Instagram and all that kind of stuff, never actually done a decent website. So finally I've got a good website and it's got a bunch of content up there actually. And I'm also on Instagram, but yeah, it's probably not comprehensive, but it's got a ton of my work. Beautiful. And then OnePath, what's the timeline and how are people going to be able to get it? So OnePath comes out April the 8th. That's like a month from now. That's very soon.

1:43:29I don't know when you release this, but yeah, hopefully up very soon for your audience. Within a few weeks of recording this. It's a 200 page book, but there's three more books altogether. There'll be four books in total, each about the same size. So I've already been doing it for like, when was the pandemic? When did that start? I've lost track of time already. Boy, 2020. Yeah. 2020 has been five years. I feel like I just started it, but I've already been making it for five years and I'll probably be doing it for another two years yet. So. Yeah, that's wild. Now, do you foresee, do you have any aspirations to see it expand beyond comic books?

1:44:03Have those ideas started percolating or have you put those on a leash so that you can focus on getting the work done that's at hand? Yeah, I really push that stuff away, actually. I work in the, as you know, in the world of film and video games and so on. So everyone would ask me, I was just going to, you're making a new IP. Is it going to be a game? Is it going to be merchandise? Is it going to be film and so on? And actually that's, I was completely uninterested in that. And I don't know why I'm not being dismissive of those things because I've made them and helped to make some of those sorts of things.

1:44:30I realized it's because I wanted to keep the thing as pure to itself as possible. There's a bunch of weird and possibly challenging ideas in one path that I knew, let's say, I would just run the simulation in your head. There's going to be nudity in this book, right? If I think this creative world has to solve these other paradigms, film, games, whatever, then I know I have to curtail some of the decisions. You'll start censoring. Yeah, yeah. Editing. Censoring in the worst, but editing in ways that sort of take all the edges off and make it less unique. So I thought, no, it's a comic book. It's purely a comic book, and I'm going to do the things that I can do there.

1:45:07And then if I'm so lucky down the line that the opportunity arises for it to be other things, then great, we can adjust it there. But I'm not going to think about those things at all. In fact, if I'm honest, I was almost a little disdainful. I was like, this is a comic book. This is like pure, baby.

1:45:23I should say graphic novel. That's a grown-up word for it, but I still call it. Yeah, graphic novel. No, the tuxedo, the sort of black-tie version of the comic book. And I'll point people to One Path, certainly, in the show notes and link to the website as well. When you reflect back on your work and time with Weta Workshop, can you think of an example of something that was particularly hard to pull off that you ended up being very proud of? I'm just deeply interested in following you through that journey, having you tell a story of any project that comes to mind. The one that resonates for me is District 9.

1:46:07I got to work on District 9, which was Neil Blomkamp's debut film. I'll tell you the whole arc of that and jump into a couple moments from it. But I know other people had this experience. It started as Halo. And actually, we started working on Halo, the feature film adaptation of the video game, amazing video game. It started there with no director. And so Richard just said, you know, we might be working on this. Peter's trying to produce it. He's going to try and find someone. Let's just go. We don't have a script. We don't have anything. We just have the game. And so we actually spent a long time creatively exploring that.

1:46:39And then we met Neil Blomkamp. And it was like, that was a revelation. I had my doubts about that as a film because I thought, it's a great game, but how can this be a film? I wasn't even quite sure. But then when Neil turned up, and he'd never made a film before, I'd seen his little shorts. I was like, holy hell, okay, now I get it. This guy has got a style and a vision, and it's completely unlike anything else. Now I can see the film. This is going to be amazing. But then all of a sudden, one day, that whole film fell over. Now, at the time, just for context, at the time, what had you been brought on to do exactly?

1:47:12I was doing concept design. What workshop would have done, I don't know. but the aspiration would have been to make many of the props and vehicles. In fact, we were making a warthog and we were making, yeah, we were making many, many elements of the physical aspects of the film. But the whole thing fell over. I poured my heart into that film. I had worked so hard and loved the work that I'd done and none of it will ever be seen. It's all locked away. It's all open, right? I'd done hundreds of drawings and my friends had done hundreds and thousands of drawings and illustrations. It's just an astonishing amount of work.

1:47:42And then one day it was just gone. Film's done. And then one day you're depressed. And then the next day you're just like, well, got to keep on going, right? You get up and move on to the next thing. And then all of a sudden Neil's making the idea of District 9 came along. And we'd seen live in Joburg as short. That was the basis for that. And that was like, this is even more exciting, right? No disrespect to Halo, but now we get to create, if this can happen, we get to create a science fiction world from the ground up. It can be whatever we dream up, right? And Neil has a crazy imagination. So this is going to be fun.

1:48:14And it was. But Neil is, like many directors, he knows what he wants. He has complete confidence and faith in himself. Knows when he doesn't like something, right? But is happy to change course immediately if he feels like that's not working. And so the story, I would say, of the challenging thing, overcoming it, this happened to me, but it happened to other artists as well. I designed many aspects of the film, mainly the robotics and the weapons and spaceships and stuff like that. and I was working on the Exosuit robot and we designed a full organic alien that I really loved. It was like, it was a grown robot, as if it had like skin and, you know, it was actually manufactured using organic techniques.

1:48:54So I thought it was a really interesting idea. It had hair and it looked robotic, but it also looked really different. And I thought it looked cool. You know, I had my own little doubts about parts of it, but I really liked it. And we've even went so far as to build a huge prop and ship it to South Africa. And they shot scenes with Shalto Copley in the thing. So I'm like, this is cool. And then all of a sudden, Neil just changes his mind. Like, no, it's not going to work. That thing doesn't quite work. I want something bigger, scarier, heavier, right? And so, again, I had that same moment at the end of Halo.

1:49:26My design that I poured months into, that my friends built, that's nothing. That's just air now. Goodbye. And then you have to go snap yourself out of it. You cannot be depressed. You can't be bummed. I'm just going to be like, okay, now I've got this new problem to solve. I've got to figure out what this next version is. And I think I probably did like 30 designs in the course of a week, right? Just working my ass off to create as many options as possible. Part of it's competition. It's like I wanted to make sure I got my design in there. It's the wolf at your back. And the thing that came out of it was even better.

1:50:02Neil was absolutely right. He got the thing that solved the creative problem that was this threatening, scary, but also superpower for Shalto to wield. So, and by the way, just for someone else's experience, the guy who designed the aliens is a friend of mine, David Meng, amazing sculptor. He had a summer experience where he worked for months on an alien design and we made it as prosthetics. It was all going to be prosthetics. You put guys in suits and then they walk around wearing these alien prosthetics. He sculpted this beautiful design, beautiful prosthetic. They painted it, sent it South Africa, and then Neil went like, done work.

1:50:35Did Neil give reasons or was it just a very simple, doesn't work, we need some things? I can't remember. In my mind, it just doesn't work. Nils doesn't have a lot of fluff. It's just like, you know. But he may have given more. I can't remember. I saw in Dave what I felt, right, which is this like, ugh. He had made a Fabergé egg of astonishing detail, right, this beautiful thing, and then goodbye, it's dust. That experience is just so common in making film. But anyway, the alien that he made out of that, he just went, He collapsed to the floor and then he pulled himself back up. And the next day he was sculpting the new thing.

1:51:12And what finally made it to the film was even better than the other designs. So I want to hear more about this. I want to dig into this psychological resilience piece a little bit because I've spent time with a lot of artists. You certainly have spent time with more artists. But it's easy for an artist, whether that person is a visual artist or a writer or otherwise, to get attached to their darlings. to get very attached. It's incredibly understandable. And then I recalled distinctly, this is a few years ago, maybe it was two years ago, and I did my first creative sprint, coming back to what I want to do more of, with a number of concept artists who'd done a lot of work for Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, really incredible with fantasy concept art, but also really fully fleshed out covers of you name it, any iconic player's handbook, et cetera, from D &D or otherwise.

1:52:10They just created these masterpieces. But what struck me most was not their capabilities. It was two aspects. I mean, they were both good at quality, but exceptionally good at speed. So number one, it was just the speed and their ability to hear an idea, sit down for an hour with a pot of coffee and start with silhouetting a lot of the times and then smashing out ideas. But the characteristic that stuck out to me most, and I don't know if this is born or built, that's what I want to ask you about, is how unattached they were. Meaning they would produce so much work. And I was working with, let's just say, a project manager.

1:52:51We were all in person, shacked up in the middle of the countryside at this hotel just to do this work on this fantasy world that has been kind of renamed. Initially, it was the Legend of Cockpunch, long story, but later Legends of Varlata and could actually be modified very easily to be a serious, viable, full-blown fantasy world, which might be something I explore. But the reason I bring it up is I would have a decent idea of what I wanted to do because I also grew up collecting comics, wanted to be a comic book penciler, so I think very visually. But they were accustomed to having 70 plus percent of their stuff X'd out by IP holders and starting over.

1:53:36And they were so unfazed by it. It stuck with me ever since my first day watching them be so unattached. And I brought up the project manager because he's done... Actually, I have his new book here. I'll just give him a quick shout out. Hold on one sec. So one of them was Adam Lee. And you can see here, this is worlds and realms, dungeons and dragons. It runs through basically 50 years of gameplay and different worlds within the D and D ecosystem. But he and his writing partner both said to me, they're like, be super blunt. You don't have to wear kid gloves, dance around it. They're like, if you don't like something, just say you don't like it.

1:54:17And it was very, very hard to do because I get so attached to my own little middling attempts at artwork. So how do you develop that? Is it just brute force repetition where you've built up so much scar tissue over time that you get better at handling it? Maybe. Those guys sound very, very good at handling that. I would probably be a more emotionally fragile even than that because I do get protective. But I did realize early on working at Weta Workshop because I'd never done professional work before, especially not at the speed. I love the speed, by the way. And I think speed gives the work a quality of its own, which I think is what I love and chase after.

1:54:56But I realized you have to generate a ton of work. Whether you like it or not, you're in competition with your other artists, which is a great camaraderie, but it's still a competition. And you're all bouncing ideas off each other. And most of your ideas will be rejected. And you kind of know this because if you're doing 100 versions of a character and your team's doing, you know, 100 more each, it's only going to be one of them. You kind of know whether you're thinking or not, whether you're aware of it or not, that a lot of that stuff's going to be thrown away. But it does hurt when it is thrown away, especially an idea that you're passionate about.

1:55:26And so you realise very early on that you have to become unattached. You do need to care about the work deeply, right? It is your baby. You have to care about it. And if you don't care about it, the work won't be any good. So you cannot become cynical to the work. You have to love it. and you have to be able to let go of it. Those two things are really in opposition because you're fighting with yourself. It's so hard to just let go when you care so deeply. But that's what you have to learn. And those guys obviously mastered it. They knew that they could be in the state of loving the work and enjoying it and then just be like, whatever will happen, will happen.

1:56:01And know that the joy is not actually in what happens next with that. It's actually in the doing of the work itself. As long as you did something great there, well, now I have an opportunity to do something great again or try. I think they obviously had mastered that. And that's what I tried to chase after was like, well, I love the work, the process of doing it. I want to enjoy that process and whatever will be, will be after that. At least you're trying to get there. That's easier said than done because you still care about it going on and becoming a part of the movie. So there's a competitive part of you that wants to win.

1:56:31That doesn't go away. Yeah. I feel like you need that though. Right. And that's, that strikes me as the crux of the challenge. It's easy to, I shouldn't say it's easy. It's not easy. But it's easier to either care a ton or not care at all. But it's really hard to care a lot and then also have the what will be will be attitude with the work. That strikes me as a combination that is super tricky, but it's really, really important. I think I've become better at it with writing. I'm still very precious about anything that I paint or draw. I mean, ridiculously precious. But with the writing, it's like, hey, look, it doesn't matter how cute and clever you think that page or that chapter or that character is.

1:57:27If your test readers say it's fucking boring or it's confusing, you got to kill it. It is. Yeah. Well, they've given you even a subjective to them. It's an objective fact. And it's not like you could argue with them. No, this is why it's good. That's something in the art, right? Your artist probably realized this. If it didn't make sense to you, if it didn't solve the problem, if that's not the character you were after, they can't argue into saying why it is. You felt it and it's true, right? And so the way to solve that problem is to go back and do it again and have another go at it because that's how you would actually solve the problem and actually come up with the right answer.

1:58:02You won't solve it by like some meta analysis of this is why. Look, here's my study. Here's all my diagrams of why this drawing is just the one you should want. That don't make any sense. Are there any particular, and I suppose they would need to have work that people can see. They don't have to be concept artists or concept designers, but are there any particular artists who have really inspired and informed how you do what you do? That could be the aesthetic, but it could also be, I mean, you mentioned Salvador Dali earlier, right? It could be process. It could be philosophy. It could be anything.

1:58:38I'm just wondering if you could sort of mention any of your influences or inspirations, whether past tense or current. I'm not really very influenced by the technical. I'm not very interested in the technical a lot of the time, like how something is done. I find it interesting, but it doesn't really motivate me. But there are artists, and it doesn't really matter how they do their work, that have absolutely inspired me. Salvador Dali was one of those ones where it's like, I love realistic-looking stuff or quasi-realistic-looking stuff. And then someone who twisted reality in such a way, it was just like mesmerizing.

1:59:12I've actually got a book here. The artist that really blew my mind, the teenager. I grew up reading 2000 AD, Judge Dredd. Oh, fantastic. Unreal. Oh, yeah. I think that's how I was introduced to, might have been how I was introduced to Simon Bisley for the first time. Oh, Slaying the Horned God. Oh my God, look at that. This is the book. So I was 15 and reading 2000 AD and I was getting better at drawing. I wanted to be a comic artist. I really wanted to work for 2000 AD. I started to get to a level. I'm thinking, I think I'm okay. I think I could send in a folio. I think I could do this, right?

1:59:50And then this came out. Actually, the book before this came out was ABC Warriors, which he did in black and white. It's all penmanship. But that work, his work, just freaking blew the lid of my mind. Oh, my God. It's so nuts. It's still unparalleled. It's Frank Frazetta and Corbin and all of that dialed to a totally unique level. And I don't know how he does it. I know he's just a magician. He's on another planet. He summoned true magic here. And I'm interested in how he did it. Can I just have a super nerd fest with you for a second? So hold on for one second. all right so for people who don't have any idea what the hell we're talking about you can look him up but uh this is yeah yeah so this is simon bisley yeah the art of simon bisley heavy metal man what a great magazine that was too yeah i think they just re-released it by the way the french version metal helant i don't know whether you say that i can't remember exactly how i chanced upon it but i remember picking up slain the horn god and just thinking to myself what in the fuck is this how is it even possible?

2:01:00And then his work on Lobo. I remember that very distinctly as well. Just an incredible, incredible artist. Okay. Now, are you inspired or deflated? Both. To nerd on him for one more second though, did you ever buy the Bible, his Bible? He did works from the Bible, mainly from the, oh no, no, from both Bibles, Old and New Testament. Dude, go out and buy it now. I don't know if you can still, they're still in print, but there's two volumes of it and they're absolutely incredible wow yeah really raw but just beautiful but you to your point it was both deflation like that rug pulled out from under you like i thought i was maybe good enough and then you realized no no this the level is up here somewhere that you know the ceiling just went way up and the ceiling was already very high so and so it was this was a great thing to happen really it was it was depressing i was actually really like punched in the guts by that as well but then you have to you And you're like, well, I just need to get better.

2:01:55And I did something actually that I weirdly still feel a slight shame for because I never draw from life or from anyone else's drawings. I always draw from my own imagination. But I started copying some of his drawings for a while, thinking that if I could just figure out how he does his line work or something like that, it was useless. It was a waste of my time, but I did it for a little while. You mentioned two other names. So Frazetta, Frank Frazetta. and for people who don't know Frank Frazetta, I mean, go look at everything you can find. I remember being so enthralled by this, not going to do it justice, but Viking-like character with the kilt, with the polar bears pulling the chariot and his mastery of not just the male figure, but also his women are just like, I mean, come on, unbelievable.

2:02:45Like that woman coming out of the water slash murk with the snake wrapped around her with that huge creature in the background. The artwork is just, it's hard to describe, but he was such a genre breaker in so many ways. You mentioned another name that I didn't recognize, Corbin. Yeah, Richard Corbin. I don't know where he's from. I think he was an American artist, but he was in a lot of heavy metal. And in fact, there's a homage. One of my favorite moments in Slane is, I won't find the page, but there's a homage. They talk about Slane being the king of kings. And in the background of the shot, There's Slane being thrown as the king of the Celts or whatever.

2:03:22And behind him is Den, I think, is the character from Richard Corbyn and Conan. And they're both. In the back of one tiny panel are these two masterful paintings of Conan in the style of Rosetta. But in the front is Slane in the style of Bisley. And behind that is Den in the style of Corbyn. And he had a very specific way of painting. In fact, he's lit a bit like you are now. blue light on the side, right? Yeah. Robin had this very specific way of lighting his characters. And it's anyway, but he did a heavy metal series. I actually don't even know what the story is about. I don't think I even read them.

2:03:58I just looked at them. I just sat there looking at his work and find his work. You'll absolutely love it. He does big, powerful, masculine figures as well as buxom, beautiful, strong women that blow your mind. Yeah, you'll love it. You'll love it. Okay, cool. I'll check it out. I saw, believe it or not, not far from where I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas, I saw my first original Frank Frazetta piece, which is owned by Robert Rodriguez, who's a famous film director. He did Sin City. He's worked with James Cameron on Alita Battle Angel. He's done tons and tons of movies. And he collects objects, kind of like you and Richard also.

2:04:41He's just got the best toys. And he has a Frazetta piece when you walk into his house. And it's lit as if it's in a dungeon of sorts with this very dramatic lighting. And it's just, it's amazing work. There was a museum somewhere in New York of Frazetta's work, but I think there was some family issue. So I don't know what state it's in now. But I had the chance once of, I was in New York and me and my partner, we could either go to the Frazetta Museum or that's what I wanted to do. But I actually didn't know how to get there. I didn't know where it was. And to be honest, if I'd gone there, I don't think I would have found it.

2:05:12But the other choice was to go, and to mention one more artist, was to go down to Delaware to where N.C. Wyeth had a studio. Do you know N.C. Wyeth's work? You know, I was going to try to bullshit. I don't, no. He's an illustrator, an illustrator from the turn of the last century. He did like famous book illustrations of like pirates. I was going to say, was he kind of like... Lyendecker's vintage? Yeah, yeah, in that era, maybe a little earlier. Free Rockwell. That's why I do think I've come across the name. I wasn't totally bullshitting. There was like a flicker of recognition. Howard Pyle was another great American illustrator, and he was one of his students or compatriots.

2:05:48Anyway, his work is astonishing. I went to see that, and that was semi-religious, standing in front of his paintings. They were huge. N.C. Wyeth? Yeah, the letter N.C. Wyeth. Oh, there he is. Yeah, yeah. N.C. Wyeth. That absolutely mind-boggling and religious experience. Oh, wow. Standing in front of those paintings. I recommend if you're in that part of the world going there, it might still be there. In fact, it's where his studio is. This stuff's incredible. Yeah. Super mesmerizing. But he is a great painter on the caliber of the great painters of Europe in that illustrious history of great paintings.

2:06:23He's up there, but yet he'd be called an illustrator, which is like a word that trivializes, really, what he does. This was true for a lot of those artists in that generation. Maybe it's just because it was commercialized. I mean, Norman Rockwell dealt with a lot of this as well. of course. But Leindecker, when he was creating iconic male figures for selling button-up shirts and suits or whatever, as works of art, they're spectacular. They take you there, right? You feel them. You fall into those images and you feel like you're there in a way that even a photo sometimes can't achieve. I find that mesmerizing.

2:06:57I just want to throw another name out there. Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes. Oh, 100%. When you say Rockwell, my mind jumps to Bill Watterson. Absolutely mind-boggling illustrations. I know they're comic books, little cartoons in a newspaper, but every now and then he got to play with his illustration and take it to another level and you could really see that he was a true master. Yeah. Unbelievable. I still remember to this day, I own just about every compendium of Calvin and Hobbes, but for whatever reason sticks in my mind are his color paintings of Calvin and Hobbes outside during the fall with the leaves changing color with the birch or aspens, probably birch and other trees and just the kaleidoscopic autumnal colors, that foliage is partially what I remember.

2:07:53And also as a side note, now this could be apocryphal. I don't know if it's a true story, but I like the story, which is Bill Watterson, to my knowledge, kind of like you with One Path, was quite a purist with his characters and with Calvin and Hobbes. And I recall at one point, I think it was one of his partners or maybe it was a pitch for licensing to create a Hobbes plush toy that was really large. And so the story goes, I believe he took a pair of scissors and just attacked it and ripped it to his hands. Really? as his way of saying, fuck no over my body. We're not going to do it. Which I found so endearing.

2:08:35I mean, I like to believe it's true. Is he still going? Do you know? I don't know what he's up to. He's very, as I understand it, very reclusive. For years, since I started the podcast, he's been on kind of my top 10 list. I was like, if he would ever play ball, that's the key ingredient. But if Bill Watterson would ever really sit down and just have a really open conversation where we could just shoot the shit, have a cup of tea or a drink, who knows, whatever his preference is, and talk like this? Man, the stories that you could get. I would love to know what you've just intimated there and talked about, you know, why that emotional reaction to that merchandise, even if that's not specifically true, it's true that he didn't really want to commercialize it in those other ways.

2:09:18Why? I would find that really interesting because I totally understand. I'm maybe not as adverse to that as he sounds like he was, but I think all the time about the reasoning for making art. Why are you doing it? What is art about? It is more than just drawing pictures and making stories. It is finding truth. Maybe he found some real profound truth and he found that he's expressed it and that anything else was actually watering down to that truth, perhaps. I'm just guessing because I feel that art and the act of creativity broadly and generally – Actually, no, to come back to me specifically, making art as comic books and stories, is this quest to find truth or to point towards truth.

2:09:56It is like science. I don't think science and engineering and art are very different at all. I just think that, like the way I was describing with the way I create, your imagination is throwing up explanations, ideas, theories, possibilities. And then you are the instrumentation, if it's a scientific analogy. You are the instrument. Your emotions are the instrument. Some part of you throws up conjecture, and then your body tells you, that feels right, right? And that's the scientific instrument confirming or giving you the measurement, right? Yeah. It's a little bit different than science in this way, but you know when it's true.

2:10:32You know when it's right, and that's why you go down that path of chasing that thing. And I'm not saying that means that it's going to be true for everyone, but you know it's true for yourself. And so, you know, there's something in that, and that is one of the most liberating ways of creating. Can you think of a project that fundamentally, maybe that's too big a word, but changed you in some way, right? So you before the project and you after the project are different. That could be a skill set. It could be a set of beliefs. It could be anything. But do any projects come to mind where you before and you after are quite different in some respect?

2:11:15It's not a project. I'm going to cheap out in a way, but also talk about something very meaningful. And I know it's something you think about. That's having a child. I was talking about Aaron Stuppel before, but it's having a child. I was not prepared. Not that a child is a project, right? I guess in a way. But having a child when my boy came out, it was like instant. Whoa, I just snapped and you moved your head at the same point. That was cool. It's like I'm in control. I'm trained. I've been well trained. I'm like the Manchurian candidate, all your work bearing fruit. I cannot tell you. There's most changes in your life.

2:11:54You're working on a project. Something goes right. Something goes wrong. You have to internalize it. You feel something about it. You have to sit there, internalize it. It might take you, maybe it takes you a few minutes. Maybe it takes you a week. Maybe it takes you a month. Maybe it takes you the rest of your life. But you internalize it and then you figure out a new thing from it. But weirdly enough, having a child was instantaneous. I felt like I was a different person. I had a different realization. All my priorities just got reshuffled in a split second. I felt like a profound connection to that person.

2:12:22And I realized all these things like, holy hell, he's going to discover that there are elephants, you know, like what? You know, it's like, or there's this whole world of possibility for him. And then also you start thinking, this is maybe one of the profound things that I think most parents get is you, instead of thinking of your own life, you start thinking beyond your life. You start thinking multi-generationally. Without even wanting to, you just can't help it. You start thinking that way because you start thinking, oh my God, I've got to make sure things are good for them in the future. I've got to give them the best possible chance.

2:12:53So you start thinking your horizon goes way out into the distance, which is a beautiful thing. And then there is the mirror of a child and that everything you do is going to be reflected back at you. So you can see the good and the bad, right? And selfishly, it's a chance to learn because you go, you realize when you're doing something and this is a bad choice. I shouldn't have talked to him that way. I shouldn't have pushed him to do that. I shouldn't have, right? You can immediately know, you feel it. And it's like, oh boy, it's a self, you want self-help? Be a parent. It will teach you what you're doing wrong very quickly.

2:13:28I'm not saying you have the solutions, but you know when you're getting it wrong. So it gives you this opportunity to improve because you see where you've done something that didn't quite work. You see it really clearly. Well, that's hopefully my next big adventure. I got to work on some prereqs, but that's definitely the orientation at this point. Do it, man. Do it. Yeah. You won't regret it. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Really excited about it. And Greg, we've covered a lot of ground here. You know, we didn't even, you know what work of yours has stuck in my mind selfishly because at some point I'd still like to do a collaboration of some type.

2:14:01I would love that. But it's the bestiary that you created with the scaling for human size. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, for the Dr. Gordbot's world. Exactly. And I just remember flipping through that and it gave me such a nostalgic dopamine hit because I was thinking of the Fiend folio and these various hardcover books from Dungeons and Dragons. But what they did not have, which you put in, were the sizing for the human figures so people could envision their proportions and so on, which for whatever reason just got locked in my brain. I mean, from start to finish. I love National Geographic and creatures in general, animals and so on.

2:14:43And just rendering the body of something like that is just really, really fun and mesmerizing. You kind of lose yourself in it. But I had this book as a kid, I think. So yes, Dungeons and Dragons and the Fiendfolio, those kinds of things. I loved all of that with all the stats. And if you read the Grodbort's books, I'm kind of riffing on that and making fun of that. It's kind of like someone who's clearly not a scientist writing this information. Maybe they've heard a third hand and they really don't know what they're talking about it. So it's kind of taking the piss out of itself. But the other thing was a book, and I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was a book from the late 60s, early 70s.

2:15:19And I found it in the public library as a kid on Alien Worlds. Man, I'm forgetting the name. I'll end that story because I don't even remember the name and it's terrible not to remember the name. Maybe you can flash it up. But there was this 1970s book. I want to say McDougall or Dougal or something like that was the artist. He had invented an entire alien world, much like Wayne Barlow has done before, invented an entire alien world and drawn every creature in it and written about everything as if they were real. And I saw that book at probably seven or eight years old. And that's something about that, creating something out of your imagination, but utterly being convinced that it is real and pretending that it's real to the point that you summarize all of it.

2:15:58I love that. I don't know why I love that so much, but it's super fun. Grandpop's ray gun. Take it out of the case, dust it off. Yeah, exactly. Maybe they'll need them for when we land on Mars. Got to take some ray guns. We may need them. We may need them, yeah. I mean, I'm sure we'll need something like that. So, Greg, let's land the plane. We've been going for two and a half hours here. Great, yeah. And is there anything else you would like to say to my audience, request of my audience, point them to? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wind to close? My new book, One Path, is coming out very soon, April the 8th.

2:16:34So yeah, please come and check it out. I hope you like it. If you like dinosaurs, you're going to enjoy it. There's a lot of dinosaurs in there. If you like blood and gore, there's also a lot of that. It is a graphic novel. And yeah, I hope you really dig it. Come and check it out. Would the best place to look be your website or would it be somewhere else? I think so. Probably come to gregbroadmore.com and you can be directed from there. Perfect. Well, we will drive people there. Greg, so nice to see you, man. We'll need to share a drink and scheme up some wild ideas in person, hopefully, in the not-too-distant future.

2:17:05I would love that. And we do share a penchant for heavy music as well, which we didn't have a chance to get into. Maybe some juvenile delinquency also. But for people listening, I'm going to include everything we mentioned in the show notes. As per usual, Timbop blog slash podcast is where you'll be able to find that. Just search Greg's name or Richard's name, or I guess Weta is probably the easiest, W-E-T-A, and you'll be able to find everything. Greg can be found at gregbroadmoore.com, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Until next time, folks, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and to yourself.

2:17:44Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

2:18:30And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I have been fascinated by the microbiome and probiotics as well as prebiotics for decades, but products never quite live up to the hype. I've tried so many dozens and there are a host of problems.

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