Debbie Millman:
On social media, he is New York Nico and his short videos, photos, and stories celebrate the enduring wonder and wackiness of life in New York. He’s been called the Unofficial Talent Scout to the city, and if like millions of others, you’ve seen his work, you’ll know why. It’s full of New Yorkers of all stripes doing their thing, working, singing, singing while working, riding a bike with a trash can balanced on their head. Normal everyday stuff. In the early days of COVID, he was one of the local heroes when his Instagram channel brought much-needed attention and money to storefront businesses trying to survive in the era of social distancing. He even won a Presidential Medal for his work. I interviewed Nick Heller on Design Matters last year, and we talked all about his life and his career, but this was before his work led to the publication of a brand new book. It’s called New York Nico’s Guide to New York City. It’s just been published, and today he’s here to dish all about it. New York Nico, aka Nicolas Heller, welcome to Design Matters.

Nicolas Heller:
Thank you. Honored to be here.

Debbie Millman:
Nick, let’s remind people of a few important facts. One, you are a native New Yorker as am I, and you’re also considered the Unofficial Talent Scout of New York City to millions of people in and out of New York. Remind us how you first got that title.

Nicolas Heller:
I think I just called myself the Unofficial Talent Scout of New York once, maybe on a post or something, and it kind of just stuck, and then The New York Times used that title in an article, so I’ve been giving them the credit because I think it sounds better coming from them than it does from myself.

Debbie Millman:
Self designated.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, being the self-proclaimed Unofficial Talent Scout isn’t as cool as The New York Times calling me the Unofficial Talent Scout.

Debbie Millman:
Well, you first became interested in film, I believe it was the eighth grade, and you took your first film class in high school. You left New York City to go to college and then went to Hollywood to pursue your career there. And I know while you were living in Los Angeles, you failed your driver’s test three times, which makes for quite a lot of difficulties in terms of getting around Los Angeles. How did you get around when you were there?

Nicolas Heller:
I biked everywhere.

Debbie Millman:
Did you?

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, I biked everywhere. I was in the best shape of my life.

Debbie Millman:
So was failing the driving test, the primary reason you decided to come back to New York?

Nicolas Heller:
I mean, it was one of many reasons. I just wasn’t booking any work while I was out there. I went out there because I thought I was going to make it as a hotshot music video director and just failed miserably. So that was the main reason why I moved back, but I also just … At the end of the day, I’m glad I experienced it. I feel like none of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t experienced Los Angeles and living somewhere else for an extended period of time. But yeah, just not for me.

Debbie Millman:
You said something, I believe it might be in your book. I have it in my research. I’m not sure if I read it in your book or if I read it in one of the other interviews that you’ve done, but you said this. “What I discovered was the whole thing about how the grass is always greener on the other side, but I don’t know much about grass. I grew up around Union Square.” And I love that you shared that, and I think it’s such a wonderful way of considering confronting what we think we need to do versus what we end up doing for lots and lots of different reasons. But it seems that in order to find out that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, you have to walk over to that side too.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, you got to experience it in order to know that what you have right in front of you, it’s the best.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah, there’s no place like home?

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah. Anytime people tell me that they’re tired of New York, I say, “All right, well, go somewhere else for a little bit, and you’ll be back or you won’t.”

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Nicolas Heller:
But when you’re born and raised in New York, it’s like you’re used to a certain type of energy and movement. I just wasn’t getting that.

Debbie Millman:
I think anybody that does live in New York for any amount of time at any point in their lives ends up with some of New York in their DNA and that never goes away.

Nicolas Heller:
No, never.

Debbie Millman:
I think people that leave the city will always have that. I haven’t met many people that have lived in New York and then left New York that aren’t proud of that DNA in their system.

Nicolas Heller:
Oh, yeah. I love going to other cities and meeting New Yorkers and just it hasn’t left them, and they miss the hell out of it. I remember I was in Miami recently, which I consider to be the sixth borough. I know that’s controversial, but there’s so many New Yorkers out there, and I was taking an Uber to the airport and I just had the best conversation with this native New Yorker. He was so happy to just talk about New York and all the places that he misses. But yeah, it’s always a blast going outside of New York and finding New Yorkers.

Debbie Millman:
When you first came back to New York, you were coming back to find yourself again, and in one of your lowest moments on that journey at that time was a visit to Union Square, a place that was very familiar to you. And you saw a street character out of the corner of your eye who you’d seen all throughout high school. What happened next changed the trajectory of your life and ultimately led to not only your career, but to your writing this book, and I’m wondering if you can share some of that history with our listeners.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah. After failing at being a Hollywood director, I came back to New York and was living with my parents in Union Square and trying to contemplate what I was going to do next. So I was just sitting in the park thinking, and I noticed this New York City street character who I’d seen all throughout high school. He is a six-foot-seven white guy with dreadlocks who carries around a 10-pound sign that says, “The six-foot-seven Jew will freestyle rap and heal you too.” Prior to this moment, I was a pretty introverted and shy person, but I used this low point in my life as an opportunity to just break out of my comfort zone and talk to this stranger, and we ended up walking around the city together having a great conversation.
And by the end of that, I asked if I could make a documentary on him, and he obliged and I made this five-minute film about this New York City character that everyone has seen before, but maybe didn’t know the full story of. And it made me realize that I could do this for a plethora of amazing New York City characters, and that’s what I did, and then that turned into my Instagram.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide that the artists that you were filming, whether it be the six-foot-seven-inch performer or any of the other subsequent films that you made, what gave you the sense that these artists would be as compelling to other people as they were to you?

Nicolas Heller:
Well, at first I didn’t know that they would be interesting to other people. I just saw them as in my head, they were celebrities like Ted [inaudible 00:08:08], the six-foot-seven Jew was as famous as the Kardashians in my mind. Everyone knew who this guy was, but no one knew his story. So I figured that putting their story out there and kind of spotlighting them in that way, people would be intrigued. And unfortunately, these videos that I made didn’t really get the viewership that I was hoping for. I just put them out on YouTube. This was in 2013 when web series was kind of becoming a thing, and it was a little discouraging because in my eyes, these were incredible stories that everyone should know about, but it didn’t reflect that in the views.

So it was also around the time that Instagram was really pushing video. So I started, rather than doing these fully fleshed out five-minute slice-of-life films, I was like, well, why don’t I just film the same people on my phone, not edit anything and just put it up in real-time? And then that’s what people started gravitating towards. It took a minute, but people started gradually getting more and more interested.

Debbie Millman:
Do you consider yourself to still be introverted and shy?

Nicolas Heller:
I am. Doing the press for this book has been not so fun for me because I do not like being in front of the camera. I don’t love having to talk about my work, although I do love talking to you. But yeah, no, I’m still introverted. I’m not as introverted as I once was. I’m not shy anymore. I guess I was kind of shy prior to 2013, but now I can really talk to anybody. But no, I like being sort of a behind-the-camera guy. You don’t need to know anything about me. It’s about the people and the places and the things that I’m documenting.

Debbie Millman:
You’ve gone on to direct big-time commercial campaigns for the New York Times, Nike, Major League Baseball, Calvin Klein, Timberland, and many, many others. Yet you seem to be particularly interested in these small businesses that really make up the fabric of New York City life. What is it about these folks that interests you the most?

Nicolas Heller:
Well, about a year before the pandemic, I started this hashtag called Mom and Pop Drop. I started gaining this following on Instagram, and I wanted to sort of give back to the people and the businesses of New York. So I figured by doing this hashtag, I would give free ad space to small businesses that were interested. So they would film sort of like a selfie video talking about their business, and I would just post it on my page, and that was just a way to give back. People seemed to enjoy it, but it didn’t really move the needle by any stretch of the imagination. And it wasn’t until the pandemic that Mom and Pop Drop really started to have an impact, and it all started with one of my favorite people in New York, Henry Yao, the owner of Army & Navy Bag on 177 East Houston Street.

This was in April or May, late April, early May, a friend of mine reached out and told me that Henry was really struggling, there was nobody coming in, he owed months of rent, and another customer had set up a GoFundMe for him. I think they were looking for like $50,000. And my friend asked if I could share the GoFundMe, and I was like, “Well, why don’t I come in and talk to him? I’ll do an interview, post a video on my page.” And I was very familiar with Henry, although we weren’t on a first name basis, I would just go in every now and then. But when I met him to interview him, I just became sort of enamored by this guy, and after posting the video, we raised $50,000 in a day, I think, and that made me realize how special Instagram can be and how you can use social media for good.

People just really wanted to support this guy, and it wasn’t just New Yorkers, it was people from all over the world that just wanted this guy to succeed, and that made me realize that I could continue this with other businesses. So that’s what I did. The next one was Punjabi Deli, and then after that, there was this banh mi shop, and it just went on and on and on, and was able to help raise a lot of money for these businesses that needed it. Through that, I became very close with a lot of these businesses and the owners. To this day, some of my best friends are small business owners like Jamal from Village Revival Records and Henry and Ali from Casa Magazine. Anytime I am in a bad mood and I need a smile, I’ll go to one of these places because they just have the best energy and they’re fun to be around.

Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to gather so many of these stories, sort of the best of New York Nico and write a book?

Nicolas Heller:
Well, one of the most frequently asked questions I get on DM is, “Hey, I’m going to be in town. Can you give me some recommendations?” Obviously, I’m not going to answer all of these messages from strangers, but what I can do is make a book that has all these answers, and this book is, people have been asking me, “What sets this book apart from other New York City guidebooks?” And I could give you a bunch of reasons, but the main reason is that it’s my guidebook. It’s like my favorite places in New York. It’s not anyone else’s favorite places in New York, although in the book you’ll see, I have a lot of my friends who take me to some of their spots, which have become my favorite spots. But I don’t focus on fine dining. There’s no fine dining establishments. I’m not focusing on bars because I’m not really a drinker.

These are just like mom-and-pop shops that have been around for 20, 30, 40, 200 years. Some of the businesses are much younger, but I feel like they’re going to be the next generation of classic old-school mom and pops, if that makes sense. A good chunk of them are in Greenwich Village because that’s where I was born. I was born around Greenwich Village, I went to school around Greenwich Village, so a lot of the places that I’ve been going to for a long time are there, and fortunately are still around. But then throughout my work, I’ve been able to explore farther outside of that particular area, and I’ve found amazing places in the Bronx and Queens and Staten Island and Deep Brooklyn. So yeah, so it’s just like my recommendations. If you follow me and you like the stuff that I post, then here are my suggestions for you.

Debbie Millman:
I loved reading this book for so many reasons. Selfishly, I am, as I mentioned, a native New Yorker. I also have, I think, the noted distinction of having lived in all of the boroughs except the Bronx.

Nicolas Heller:
Oh, wow.

Debbie Millman:
And having lived in the city now for six decades, I was familiar with some places, some of the older places when I moved to Manhattan in 1983, they were places that I began to frequent. But then it was also really, really wonderful to learn about places that I had never been to and had never heard about. So the book is called New York Nico’s Guide to New York City, and you feature 100 business establishments. How on earth were you able to get this list down to 100?

Nicolas Heller:
I visited 130-something spots, and I wanted to include all of them, but my publisher said, “You have a page count that you have to meet, so you’re going to have to whittle this down a bit.” So yeah, I mean, it was hard. I hope that there’s a part two because between when I turned in the manuscript and now, I discovered 10 to 15 more spots that I now love and frequent, and that’s the beauty of New York is you keep discovering new spots. I feel like any other city, not any other city, but many other cities you go to, there’s like a handful of spots that everyone knows about, and those are everybody’s favorites, and there’s no discovering new places. But New York, it’s like you find out about a new spot every day.

Debbie Millman:
You write in the book about how New York has been counted out many times before. You recall the Daily News headline in the 1970s, “Ford to City, ‘Drop Dead'”, the gritty 1980s, 9/11, and you share how New York has weathered everything, but the COVID-19 pandemic was something else, and New York City shut down. You write about how the streets were empty and the tourists were gone. As someone that was living through it so closely, was there ever a time where you worried that New York City might not recover?

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, around the time that I started helping these businesses, I was terrified that I would have to be doing this forever. It seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I imagine most people thought that way because it’s hard to be there and think that things could go back to normal.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah. When I first came back, I went to Los Angeles to be with my then-fiance. We ended up eloping rather than having a big wedding, primarily because of COVID. But when I came back to Manhattan and first walked around, I cried. I cried walking the streets because of how many storefronts were now empty.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah. It’s crazy that it really wasn’t that long ago, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

Debbie Millman:
Yes.

Nicolas Heller:
But things have gotten better. I’m not being hit up every day by someone whose beloved business is closing, which is nice. I mean, it obviously still happens, but New York is back and it’s alive. But yeah, no, I definitely did have that fear.

Debbie Millman:
The book is titled New York Nico’s Guide to New York City, but you emphatically state that the book is not just a guidebook. How would you describe it?

Nicolas Heller:
Well, to me, I’m trying to figure out how to say this without it sounding arrogant, but I want it be like-

Debbie Millman:
Ah, be arrogant. You’re among friends.

Nicolas Heller:
No, I want it to be an artifact. I want it to be something that you’ll find on a bookshelf 20 years from now and you’ll open it up and be teleported back to this time in New York history. I’m hoping that all of the places in the book are still around, but since I started the book a little over two years ago, I would say eight to 10 of the spots have closed. It’s what happens in New York. So I’m hoping that this book cements these incredible businesses into New York history so that they’re never forgotten.

And like I said, 20 years from now, you can look at this book and be like, “Wow., There was a shop in New York that was devoted entirely to chess? There’s a shop in New York that was entirely devoted to rubber stamps?” I pray that these places are still open 20 years from now, and that whoever’s reading it is discovering this place and then goes to it. But for those twho don’t make it, I want them to be immortalized, and I’m hoping that this book does that.

Debbie Millman:
You start the book with a store called Abracadabra, which is at 19 West 21st Street in Manhattan. And this is a store that was originally opened by Paul Bloom in 1981. The store was bought by Robert Alnd and his brother Joe in 2007, and then handed down to Robert’s daughter Janine and her husband Brian Clark. You’ve been a customer since you were a little kid. Tell us about the store and what you found so interesting about it as a young adult.

Nicolas Heller:
Well, who doesn’t love a Halloween store that’s open year-round? Yeah, I don’t know my earliest memory, but I grew up a couple blocks away from Abracadabra. You step foot in there and there’s an energy. They have everything you could dream of, and they also have a magician on staff, so there’s always somebody there teaching you magic tricks if that’s what you’re interested in. But yeah, I know I just feel like with all the Spirit Halloweens that pop up, it’s like I always encourage people to go to these family-owned spots. You have Abracadabra, you have some others, but yeah, there’s an aura around Abracadabra for sure.

Debbie Millman:
In the Army and Navy bags description, you state that anybody who has gone into a New York City mom-and-pop shop knows that it can take some time for the owners to warm up to you.

Nicolas Heller:
Yes.

Debbie Millman:
Why is that?

Nicolas Heller:
It depends. Henry is an exception to that because Henry’s just warm to anybody who walks in. He’s just the sweetest guy ever. But then there’s people like Big Mike at Astor Place who I didn’t speak to for 20 years because I got this very intimidating vibe from him because he has that New York hustler attitude where he just wants to get his work done and anyone who’s getting in his way of getting his work done, maybe he’ll give you a little bit of attitude. So Mike is kind of a good example of that. Maybe at first you’ll think he’s rude or a little grumpy, but once you get to his core, he’s the sweetest guy ever.
And actually what made him open up to me was when I saw him in the storage area of Astor Place with his shirt off, painting a Van Gogh-inspired Biggie painting. I thought that that was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. What is the manager of Astor Place doing painting a Van Gogh-inspired Biggie? So I started talking to him about it, and apparently he had just started painting. He’s been wanting to do it his whole life, but never had the opportunity to. So he decided a week prior to me seeing him that he was going to do it on his lunch break. We became friends from that, and then I actually ended up making a film on him called Big Mike Takes Lunch. But yeah, now he’s a very close friend of mine.

Debbie Millman:
In the entry for Casa Magazine’s at 22 8th Avenue, you state that every place included in this book has some character who makes their neighborhood a little bit more special. In the case of the Casa Magazine proprietors, whenever you stop in, you feel their love for the community. Is that a requirement for mom-and-pop shop?

Nicolas Heller:
I don’t think it’s a requirement, but for a mom-and-pop shop that wants to make it into my guidebook, yes. That’s what I love about mom-and-pop shops is the owners are usually there all the time. They’ve probably been there for a very long period of time, and they’re a part of the community and everyone in the community knows them and hopefully everyone in the community loves them. Casa Magazine, in particular, is on one of my favorite blocks in New York City. A couple doors down is La Bonbonniere, which is my favorite greasy spoon diner, and then the M12 bus stops between the two of those places. And Louis Lopez, my favorite bus driver in New York City, is always driving that M12, and he kind of bridges the two spots together and it always feels like a sitcom. Whenever I’m there, something’s always happening.

Debbie Millman:
Tell me about Louis Lopez and what makes him your favorite bus driver and how you even came to that determination.

Nicolas Heller:
I love city workers. They always have the best stories, and I love people that work for the MTA. And when I met Louis and found out he literally had his bus parked outside and was just taking a little break, I immediately just got this vibe from him that he was a cool guy, and then he started showing me his kung fu moves. He’s a big dude, but he knows kung fu. He can put his leg over his head. He’s just great.

Debbie Millman:
Nick, I can’t tell you the joy, the sort of utter joy and the out loud squeal I made when I saw that you included La Bonbonniere, as you described it, a greasy spoon. I moved to New York to Manhattan in 1983 and lived at Hudson and Perry, and

My first job was at 111 8th Avenue, and so I walked from Hudson and Perry very short walk to 111 8th Avenue and passed La La Bonbonniere every single day. And while you described it as a greasy spoon, to me somehow feels like the most elegant diner in the world. The typography on the sign, the atmosphere inside, I didn’t even realize that some estimates range that La Bonbonniere has possibly anywhere from 85 to 95 years old. There’s something about that environment that I feel is quintessentially New York.

Nicolas Heller:
Also, what’s quintessentially New York about it is it’s a French restaurant, technically French, La Bonbonniere is French. I’m sure it was originally owned by a French guy. But now it is owned by a Greek guy and a Peruvian woman, and all the waiters and cooks are from Mexico. Talk about quintessential New York.

Debbie Millman:
I was also happy to see Cozy’s. Also back in 1983 when I was working at 111 8th Avenue. There was a woman, and I’ve written about her, her name was Penelope. And she seemed to me to be the most glamorous sort of competitive colleague that I had. And I remember her saying to her boyfriend that they were going to go to Cozies for dinner, and I had no idea what Cozies were. I couldn’t find them in the phone book and never knew which she was talking about. This was obviously way before the internet.

And then one day was walking around in the West Village, or really The Village, and saw Cozy’s Soup and Burger at 739 Broadway. And I learned from your book that in 2015, Crane’s New York Business published an article reporting about only 400 places in the city had either the word diner or coffee in their name, and that was about a thousand less than a decade earlier. What do you think happened? Why is there so many fewer?

Nicolas Heller:
Well, first and foremost, it’s a shame because diners are the best place to meet people, a friend that you want to get lunch with someone you’re working on a project with. It’s just the best because you can sit there for hours and generally they don’t mind. But yeah, diners are slowly dying. According to John, the owner of Cozy’s Soup and Burger, I believe him. You see fewer and fewer diners, and I think it’s just hard to keep up with fast food and everything else.

Debbie Millman:
And the margins are so tight in the food industry-

Nicolas Heller:
Exactly, yeah.

Debbie Millman:
… and restaurant business to begin with.

Nicolas Heller:
It used to be so cheap to go to a diner and it’s just not. They’re comparable to fine dining restaurants, and that’s not what diners were meant to be. I’m hoping that it turns around and we see more and more diners. I’ve actually invested in a few newer diners that have been opening up because I want to see them stick around for as long as I’m around.

Debbie Millman:
I want to read a paragraph from the book and then reveal to our audience, the mom-and-pop shop that you’re referring to. You write this, “There’s one truth that resonates throughout all five boroughs. It’s that New York City is a place filled with so many wonders that it’s easy to miss one or a hundred whenever you walk out the door. It could be a gargoyle on the roof of an old brick building. You’ve passed a thousand times and never noticed, or a statue obscured by trees and brush in one of the city’s many parks. There are always things to miss, which means there are endless chances for discovery. Few places sum up that idea as well as the odd 125 square foot structure along 7th Avenue South that countless people walk or bike past every single day.” Nick, tell us what this store is.

Nicolas Heller:
That’s Greenwich Locksmiths.

Debbie Millman:
You wrote this about a locksmith store.

Nicolas Heller:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Debbie Millman:
Tell us more about Greenwich Locksmiths.

Nicolas Heller:
And that’s what I love about this book because it’s like, I have a barber shop in here, I have a locksmith. To me it’s more about the places and the vibe that they give off and the owners and not so much about this is where you got to go to eat. This is where you have to go to buy something. Greenwich Locksmiths is such a cool place, and you can get-

Debbie Millman:
And it’s tiny, 125 square feet.

Nicolas Heller:
And sure, you can get your keys copied there, but you can also have a chat with Phil and Phil Junior who have been there forever. And on top of that, they can customize your keys, which I’m not sure many other places can do this, but they can make not just an engraving, but they can put stuff on the key. So they do this thing where they put subway tokens on the top of your keys, and they’ve done that for me, and it’s super cool. It’s the smallest, freestanding building in New York City at 125 square feet, and they’ve been doing their business out of there for decades. It’s just such a cool place.

Debbie Millman:
Nick, how do you find these places? Yes, most people walk by most of, or many of these environments, these stores, these shops and don’t see them. How do you see them?

Nicolas Heller:
I mean, I went to school around there, so I’ve known about Greenwich Locksmiths forever. But it wasn’t until, I think it was actually fairly recently that I went there for the first time and met Phil and Phil Junior. And the reason why I went there, I think they had just reached out to me and they were like, “Hey, you got to come by and check out our place.” And they were super nice, and they were actually the last addition to the book. I had already turned in the manuscript, and then I met these guys and I was like, “Wait, hold the presses. We got to include Greenwich Locksmiths in the book.”

But yeah, in general, again, a lot of these places I kind of grew up either going to or passing by. And then a lot of the places I was introduced to, many of which I was introduced to over the pandemic, and that just came out of customers or the business owners themselves just reaching out to me to be like, “Hey, if you’re around, can you come check us out?” So yeah.

Debbie Millman:
I do want to ask you about some of the boroughs. You write about Brooklyn, “There was a time when you’d tell someone in Manhattan you were going to Brooklyn and they’d look at you as if you were about to visit another continent.” I know that, and whenever I tell people I was born in Brooklyn, I always say I was born in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was Brooklyn. How and why did that change? Do you have a sense of when Brooklyn became this sort of crown jewel in the five jewels of the boroughs of New York City?

Nicolas Heller:
It’s a great question because I’m only 35, and I remember when I was in high school, I never really went to Brooklyn. I kind of just stayed in Manhattan, and it wasn’t until I graduated from college that I was like, “You know what? I want to move to Brooklyn. It seems like that’s the spot.” So I moved to Sunset Park. This was like 2013, I think, and I loved Brooklyn from the minute I started hanging out there every day. But I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you when it started to become such a hip place, such a sought-after place.

Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting how trends begin. I know that a lot of people, people that lived in Brooklyn and Queens, Manhattanites, called those people pejoratively bridge and tunnel people, which is just terrible. But I think that initially, people moved to Brooklyn because they got priced out of Manhattan and then ended up usurping the allure of Manhattan in a lot of ways.

And I always knew that Brooklyn was bigger than Manhattan, so to speak, in terms of population. I learned from your book that Brooklyn has 2,736,074 residents. Manhattan, just to compare, has an estimated 1,694,250. You can take all the people who live in St. Lucia, Granada, Micronesia, Tona, Greenland, and Monaco, and they still would make up only about a quarter of Brooklyn’s population, and I love that. I love that Brooklyn was its own city until 1898. I learned this from your book. It’s not just a guide to New York’s best places to go. It’s also, in many ways a book about New York’s magnificent history. But if somebody were to suggest that Brooklyn break off and become its own state, it might’ve seemed far-fetched, but it certainly got the numbers as you put it.

Nicolas Heller:
Yep, yep.

Debbie Millman:
You say this about Queens, “People don’t realize how important Queens is.” So my question to you, Nick, is why is that then? How important is it?

Nicolas Heller:
Queens is the birthplace of so many people who have shifted culture. For apparel, you have Ronnie Feig. You have Teddy Santis from Aimé Leon Dore. You have Angelo Bach from Awake. These are three of the biggest streetwear brands. I don’t even know if you would call them a streetwear brand anymore, but they came from Queens. In terms of hip hop, you have Nas, you have Prodigy, you have LL ool J, you have Run DMC, definitely a lot of culture shifters from Queens.

Debbie Millman:
You can hear Spanish, Urdu, Greek, Tagalog, Yiddish, Nepali, and nearly another 300 more spoken along Roosevelt Avenue alone. You start out the section about the Bronx with this declaration, “Everything you thought you knew about the Bronx was probably wrong.” Like what?

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, I feel like especially if you don’t live in New York City, when you think of the Bronx, you have a flawed perception of it. There is so much going on in the Bronx. You have, I’m not saying it, but people say the real Little Italy is in the Bronx on Arthur Avenue, you have New York Botanical Garden, you have City Island, which is one of my favorite places in the city. Obviously, you have Yankee Stadium, you have Riverdale, you have Pelham Bay Park, which is an incredible park that I was just in a couple weeks ago.

Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I learned from your book was that a quarter of the Bronx is open space with some of the nicest public parks in New York City. I think people do have this perception that it’s just buildings and apartment complexes, and it’s a quarter of it is open space.

Nicolas Heller:
They have some of the best green spaces in New York. I would highly recommend people check out the Bartow-Pell Mansion, which I just discovered the other day. You’d be shocked to go there. And the fact that you’re in New York is insane because it’s pretty much empty and it’s just full of beautiful greenery and fountains and statues, and you don’t feel like you’re in the city, but you’re in the Bronx.

Debbie Millman:
Is it true that on Staten Island you can get one of the best clam pizzas in the world?

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, Lee’s Tavern. It’s a tavern, and you would never expect it to have insanely good pizza, but alas, some of the best clam pizza you’ll ever eat.

Debbie Millman:
I spent third, fourth, and fifth grade living on Staten Island. Did not expect to go back, but now I’m making a pilgrimage to have the best clam pizza in the world because I love clams and I’m a pizza fanatic.

Nicolas Heller:
There you go.

Debbie Millman:
What Do you think is the absolute best pizza in all of New York?

Nicolas Heller:
I can’t answer that question. It depends what mood you’re in. There’s so many different types of pizza.

Debbie Millman:
I think I might go with John’s.

Nicolas Heller:
John’s? Okay. Yeah, it just depends.

Debbie Millman:
I sense sense disapproval with your-

Nicolas Heller:
No, no, no, no. That’s good. That’s good. I just don’t think that there’s a good answer to that because there’s so many different types of pizza. It really depends what kind of mood you’re in. One of my favorite pizza places, it’s in the book, it’s called Cuts and Slices. Their main location is in Bed-Stuy. It’s actually a Black-owned pizzeria, which is not super common. He takes his Caribbean roots and applies it to his pizza-making. So he has oxtail pizza and curry shrimp pizza, and it sounds crazy but it’s so good. But again, it kind of depends what kind of mood you’re in. If you want a little something extra on your pizza, then yeah, you go to Cuts and Slices. But if you want a traditional slice, then you can go to Lindustry or Mama’s Two or Louie’s or Louie and Ernie’s and the Bronx.

Debbie Millman:
Have you tried the pizza place on 7th Avenue and 23rd Street? The pizza slices are a $1.50 a piece. It’s one of the best slices in all of New York.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

Debbie Millman:
I’m not being sarcastic it is-

Nicolas Heller:
I don’t know if I trust pizza under $2

Debbie Millman:
And then I have to ask you about one other food type. That’s one of my favorites. Any sense of where you could get the very best hot dog in New York

Nicolas Heller:
That I can tell you.

Debbie Millman:
Okay.

Nicolas Heller:
You got to go to the Hot Dog King outside the Met Museum.

Debbie Millman:
Yeah.

Nicolas Heller:
I’ll tell you why his hot dogs are the best, and it’s very simple. He grills them. They’re not dirty water dogs. Dirty water dogs are no good. They take all the flavor out of the hot dog.

Debbie Millman:
Indeed.

Nicolas Heller:
You got to grill them. Nothing better than that.

Debbie Millman:
I have a couple more questions for you, Nick. Talk about the design and the illustrations in the book. The book is highly illustrated. Who did you work with and what was that process like?

Nicolas Heller:
I worked with Chris Wilson, who I’ve been working with him for eight years now, kind of on and off. And originally I was just going to use him for the cover. I knew I wanted a really special cover. I wanted this to stick out. There’s a ton of New York guidebooks. I wanted something that will catch people’s eye, and my idea was to do sort of my version of Where’s Waldo and to create this sort of fictitious neighborhood in New York that has all my favorite places and favorite people. And it started as that. And then after he did it, I was like, “Let’s get you to do a little bit more than just the cover.” So he did the maps and spot illustrations, and I just love his style.

Debbie Millman:
The book has a real and a wonderful energy to it. You mentioned writing a second edition of the book with another hundred or so places, but you’ve also said that your ambition is to make feature films about New York with your characters, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this book could become sort of episodic TV show about each of these places.

Nicolas Heller:
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that, but I guess could. I guess we have to see how it does. Maybe I’ll get a movie deal, right?

Debbie Millman:
It would be such a wonderful series to feature either by borough or by neighborhood, or by genre. There aren’t too many. There’s only one locksmith and only one rubber stamp store. But still, there’s so many ways you could organize the various mom-and-pop shops. My dad was a pharmacist and always had a mom and pop shop pharmacy for his whole career, and so it was a joy to see and re-experience life from that side of the cash register.

I used to work for him when I was in college, made all the little signs in his store. And I think it’s a celebration of anybody that was or started or created their own mom and pop shop or for anyone that wants to frequent one. I have one last question for you, Nick. You said at the beginning of New York Nico’s Guide to that you never realized how lucky you were to be born and raised in New York until after you left. Think you’ll ever leave again?

Nicolas Heller:
No. No, I don’t. I hardly ever leave now, and whenever I do, I miss it immediately and can’t wait to get home. So I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else.

Debbie Millman:
Nick, thank you so much for writing this wonderful love letter to New York City. Thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Nicolas Heller:
Thank you so much, Debbie. It’s a pleasure.

Debbie Millman:
Nick Heller’s book is titled New York Nico’s Guide to New York City. To read more about Nick Heller, go to his wonderful, vibrant Instagram feed at New York Nico, N-I-C-O. I’d like to thank you for listening and remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

The post Design Matters: Nicolas Heller appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

One of the contenders for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars this year is Sarah Polley’s latest movie, Women Talking. The movie is intense, closely observed, hopeful and disturbing, and a must watch for anyone interested in complexly beautiful stories. This is Sarah Polley’s fourth feature film as a director. And it’s now clear that she’s in the midst of an extraordinary new chapter of her career, which is also included acting in over 40 films, stage work, producing, writing, and directing television, and the writing of an extraordinary memoir. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get to talk about much of that today. Sarah Polley, welcome to Design Matters.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Sarah, with all of the accomplishments and success that you’ve had and some of which that I’ve just listed, is it true that your real ambition is to win at Wimbledon?

Sarah Polley:

I think it was when I was 10 for about five minutes, and someone interviewed me during that five minutes. And what’s great is I’d never actually played a tennis game. I’d only smashed a ball against the garage door. But yeah, I did state at an interview when I was 10 that I wanted to win Wimbledon. I’m the least athletic person you’ll ever meet in your life.

Debbie Millman:

I thought that was really charming and it’s so interesting how no matter what we accomplished or no matter what we are able to achieve, there’s always something else that we have set our sights on. At least that’s what I found with so many creative people. Both of your parents were in show business before you were born. Your mom was well known for playing Gloria Beecham on 44 episodes of the television series, Street Legal. By the time you were five years old, you had a part as a penniless child in the movie One Magic Christmas. Do you remember wanting to be an actress at such a young age or was it something that your parents encouraged you to do?

Sarah Polley:

It’s a really good question, and what I’ve thought a lot about. At one point, I was working on a documentary about child actors that I never went through with. And what was really interesting in that research was that I could find almost no child actor who didn’t claim it was their idea and that they pushed their way into it and their parents knew better, but they just had this indomitable will that their parents couldn’t contend with. And everyone told that story, including Shirley Temple who started at three and who clearly had a really overbearing stage parent. So that was my story for many years. I’m not sure about that story anymore. I will say I don’t think my parents were the archetypal terrible stage parents. They weren’t ogreish for sure, but I do think my mom was a casting director and an actor. And I think all of my siblings at some point went up for audition. So I have to imagine it was instigated by my mom. And I think early on, I liked it. And then I think that quickly changed around eight or nine.

Debbie Millman:

How does one go about even getting a part in a film at five years old? How do you have the presence to audition?

Sarah Polley:

I think that child actors generally come from the pool of overly precocious children, which is a dangerous thing because usually with precociousness comes a delay in other more important deep ways. So you become very good at pleasing a room of adults and impressing a room of adults. And I think so much energy goes into that when you’re a precocious child, that less development and work goes into actually figuring out who you are and what your actual instincts and intuitions are.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve stated that you grew up trying to fit yourself into characters other people had written. This included Beverly Cleary’s iconic character, Ramona Quimby on television, Alice from Alice Wonderland on stage, who played Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam’s movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and became famous starring as Sara Stanley, the heroine of the television show Road to Avonlea, which was based on the classic beloved books by LM Montgomery. How do you learn how to embody other characters so thoroughly before you’ve even figured out who you are?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, I think it’s complicated and maybe a little bit perilous. I think playing Ramona was a great thing for me at seven and eight, because it was this character who was so alive and honest and not always palatable. She knew she was, she was incredibly outspoken, she was really assertive. She was so completely herself. She suffered sometimes for her inability to conform, but that was what was wonderful about her. So that was great and so was Sally Salt in that sense, in terms of embodying that character. And your identity is still forming. You are very informed by this game of imagination that goes on for months and months in which primarily older men are telling you you’re doing a good job or not doing a good job, based on being the thing they’ve constructed for you. It’s a really problematic way to grow up, I think, especially as a young woman. So I found that tricky and became more tricky as I became a teenager and into early twenties, just in terms of parsing out what is my identity, versus what am I constructing to please others?

Debbie Millman:

In several of your roles, Sally Salt and Baron Munchausen and in particular, you are exposed to really, really rough working conditions for a little girl, so much so that you once had to be ambulanced to a hospital. How do you make sense of that now looking back on it? I know that you’ve written open letters to Terry Gilliam. I know that you’ve spoken to your father about how you felt about being put in the line of danger, so to speak. How do you feel about that looking back on it now and what you went through?

Sarah Polley:

It’s important to preface what I’m going to say by saying I think that it’s terrible I was put in those positions and I think that children shouldn’t be in unsafe working environments and perhaps shouldn’t be in adult working environments, period. I will say that after this many years, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to stand up to a hundred people and stop production, especially if you’re a parent that comes from a background where you don’t have access to this kind of world. My parents weren’t wealthy. My mom was an actor and at the end of her life had this small part on a TV show, but really was an aspiring actor and a casting director on Canadian Productions, but not in this big heady world of movie stars and a big budget production.

And I do think for most parents, it would be very difficult to stand up and shut down a production because you were uncomfortable with something that was happening to your child. Ideally me as a parent, I would think hopefully that would come easily. But I think that’s actually underplaying what a emergency room mentality develops on a film set. And I have seen over and over large groups of adults, many of whom are very good, decent, conscientious people become complicit in situations that were unsafe or unhealthy for kids or other vulnerable people. I’ve seen it so many times, that I’m reluctant to sit back and judge those peoples as individuals for not having the courage to stand up. I think I blame more a system that allows it to happen. I think that the people who do have authority, producers, directors, have to take a lot of responsibility and be accountable for conditions that arise on a set, because I think I did have crew members over the years in various unsafe working environments I was in as a kid, risk their jobs or lose their jobs, in order to protect me.

But that was the cost. It was very real. So I think over the years, I’m far less angry at the individuals and far more focused on the structures and what are the rules and what are the protections in place for kids and why don’t we have a third-party child psychologist for instance, that’s not employed by anybody involved in the protection or the parents? But is maybe employed by the union to be there to independently have agency to say, “This is not okay. This isn’t unsafe.” Why don’t we figure out how to make this better? I think kids shouldn’t work more than a small amount of every year if they’re going to work at all. I highly discourage parents from putting their kids into professional environments. But I do think kids will always be in films and television. So what can we do to make it much safer and to create roles for people who are there solely to have agency to disrupt a production, if it’s not going well for a child?

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written about how you had a mother who made you feel like life and the world were really exciting. But two days after your 11th birthday, she passed away from cancer. Yet you still kept working, getting bigger and bigger roles. How did you manage through this?

Sarah Polley:

It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because my oldest is turning 11 tomorrow, and so suddenly, this moment where the age I was and two days after my birthday that she died, looking at what 11 means is really interesting. It’s not quite what I remembered it. And my kid is both more responsible and competent than I remember being and also vulnerable in a way that I don’t remember myself, but I’m sure I was. I think the one thing I’ve noticed from my own kids is they’re built to adapt and they’re built to be resilient and to move on to the next thing. And I think that the things that happen to you as a kid really wait until you’re an adult to come crashing down on you in so many ways, because I think we are just built to be moving and changing and growing, and that gets folded into the experience. And I think it wasn’t really till much later that I recognized how truly difficult it was.

Debbie Millman:

After your mother died, you and your dad were left on your own. By that time, all of your siblings had already moved out. You were the youngest. You’ve written how your dad who prided himself on not being a father effectively fell apart and retreated into a [inaudible 00:10:54] cystic funk. So I have two questions about that. It’s such a major thing to have read. First, why did he pride himself on not being a father?

Sarah Polley:

He had this untraditional way of seeing the world and that permeated everything. So to him, it was a point of pride that he wasn’t taking on a traditional role of a father. He instead was a friend, that he didn’t have authority over me. He would never tell me what to do. There were no rules, there were no bedtimes. There was nothing I was not allowed to do. And so that was his thing, was, “I’m not your dad. I’m your friend.” Which on the one hand was wonderful. And I shared books with him and long conversations late at night and had this really interesting non-judgmental relationship with him or from him. But at the same time, there was nobody to catch me either. Nobody was going to notice if I didn’t come home. So it was a feeling of profound insecurity and lack of safety coupled with this wonderful gift of having a father who really thought I was great.

And I think the older I get, the more I realize what a gift that was, that to have a parent who truly values your brain and is excited by your mind and thinks you’re a really wonderful person just at his core, I think he really loved me. And I think as I get older, I’m more and more aware of what a gift that was. Now would I have preferred to have some structure and some safety and some boundaries and some sense of being safe as a kid? Of course. Would I trade that feeling of insecurity for a feeling of security with a parent who didn’t make me feel like I was really great when I was a kid? I’m really not sure at this point. Ideally, you have both. But yeah, so it was a very complex relationship. And certainly, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there.

Debbie Millman:

How bad was his [inaudible 00:12:54] cystic funk? Were you actually taking care of him?

Sarah Polley:

To a certain extent, yeah. I know I would get up and go to work at four or 5:00 AM in the morning, often in the dark. And I would’ve slept in the clothes I was going to wear the next day, ’cause that seemed to make more sense to me than having to get dressed to the morning. I know that no one had done laundry in years in that house.

Debbie Millman:

He went from bed to bed, your sibling’s beds with clean sheets till they were dirty and?

Sarah Polley:

Exactly. And the mess and the mice and the maggots just piled up. It was really pretty squalid. And I would come home and he’d have watched TV all day and smoking and burning holes and the armrest of the recliner. It was pretty bad. And I think he was genuinely depressed, and I think he may have been autistic and have had never been diagnosed and actually did have struggles with communicating or connecting to his own emotional life and communicating that to others. He was very isolated. My mother was his entry point and his connection socially and to the world. He was a man of that generation where every physical thing had been taken care of him since the day he was born, all by his mother and then right into his marriage. And so I just think he came apart and didn’t even know he had come apart, and didn’t have the resources to look for help.

So I look back on him with a very big degree of sadness and compassion at this point. And I think it was very painful for him when I moved out because really there’s no one there to take care of me. I didn’t want to live … We lived way out in the country and I wanted to live closer to my school, my friends. And I think in his mind, he got abandoned, which of course is really complicated and not quite accurate when I was 14 and leaving and he wasn’t taking care of me. But in his reality, that was the truth, and I think must have been extremely painful for him. I stayed close to him until he died. But yeah, I look back and go, “I so wish he’d had more support in order to come into himself.”

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written that at 11 years old, there was some part of you that felt you were responsible for your mom’s death. Why is that?

Sarah Polley:

I think that’s what kids do when things go wrong or a lot of kids. I think you try to figure out the way you’re responsible for things or could have altered them. So I think that took me decades to come to, as a sense that somehow this had been my fault. I think that when she was sick, there was a lot of denial about how sick she was, both from her and a lot of people around her. I think that my intuition was that there was something really serious going on. So I would talk about my mom having cancer and dying, even though that’s not language that was being used in my house. So I think what happened was that when she died, my sense was I had made up that she was dying, and by making up this lie that she was dying, had somehow willed it to happen.

And I do think there are incredible mental gymnastics that kids can play, again, watching my own kids, in order to twist themselves into being responsible for things they’re not responsible for. And the thing as a kid too is there’s often no one there to check your work, unless you’re an incredibly communicative kid. You go through 20 stages of a problem and no one’s there to correct the 10 strange logical leaps you’ve made on the way somewhere.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned leaving home when you were 14. You decided you were grown up enough to go. Your dad let you. By 15, you dropped out of high school, you were living with your 19-year-old boyfriend. No one called child services.

Sarah Polley:

No, it’s interesting. And it’s funny because a lot of people knew it was happening. And I think probably if I was to put myself in the position of one of the adults who knew this was happening, I would’ve looked at it and gone strangely I think I was in the best case scenario for me at that point. So the 19-year-old boyfriend that I had at the time, it was a high school dropout, and on paper, this is not a good situation for a 15-year-old girl, ended up being an incredible caretaker of me. And we still remain very close friends. And when I had this major spinal surgery when I was 15 years old, he was Florence Nightingale. He cooked for me and he took care of me in a way that almost nobody else I think could have. Certainly a better job I think, than my dad would’ve done at that time. So I think that the adults that did know what was going on didn’t intervene because they could see, even though this was clearly problematic and not perfect, it was probably the best case scenario for me at that moment.

Debbie Millman:

You mentioned surgery. You had been diagnosed with scoliosis four years earlier during a routine insurance medical exam for Road to Avonlea. For our listeners, can you describe exactly what is scoliosis?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, so it’s a curvature of the spine and it’s often diagnosed around adolescence, and I think majority in girls, although it happens to boys too. And I had a very severe curvature of my spine. So my spine was in an S shape, and it caused one shoulder blade to jet way out. And my whole body was pretty lopsided and I was hunched over to one side so that the tips of my fingers touched the side of one of my knees. And I think by the time they operated, it was over I think 65, 66 degree curve in my upper spine.

Debbie Millman:

Were you in pain?

Sarah Polley:

I was pretty uncomfortable. I would get back spasms. I had to wear a fiberglass brace 16 hours a day. It was really constricting. I don’t remember being in a ton of physical pain, but I would say a lot of discomfort

Debbie Millman:

Because you had that brace on pretty much the entire shoot of Avonlea.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, they had to design my costumes and it was very limiting in terms of how I could move. And as an adolescent girl, it’s like it’s already … There’s nothing more embarrassing than your body changing and growing and puberty, and then you have this added thing on top of it to be embarrassed about. It’s not an easy thing to wear a brace with scoliosis as any kid who went through that will tell you. But the brace ultimately didn’t work. And I had to have the surgery anyway because once I moved out, I just ditched the brace and there was no one there to stop me.

Debbie Millman:

The motivation to finally get surgery on your spine is one of the most poignant chapters in your memoir. And I’m wondering if you can talk about that specific decision at that particular time to have the surgery.

Sarah Polley:

So I was in a production of Alice Through the Looking Glass at the Stratford Festival, and I was 15 years old. And I started to have incredible stage fright. The kind of stage fright that started around noon, and I would be in a state of panicky sweats for seven hours. I would be in the rehearsal room, in the basement of the theater hours before every show, sobbing uncontrollably in terror, that I was going to forget a line on stage that I would humiliate myself on stage. I kept this terror as a complete secret. I didn’t confide in a single person, including the many wonderful adults that were around me. The actors in that company were great and would’ve been incredibly supportive. But I was so ashamed of the fear that I couldn’t speak it. And so it grew like a monster.

And I had been avoiding seeing an orthopedic surgeon for years since I had moved out. I had stopped wearing my brace. I knew that my spine was growing completely out of control into this curve. I had a sense I might need surgery, and I had just avoided that, ’cause the thing I had been most terrified of in the world was having this scoliosis surgery. But at some point, the terror of being on stage, which became a kind of madness. I actually started to think I was through the looking glass as Alice and everything was backwards and I had to run to stay in place. And the whole horrifying narrative of that journey of Alice Through the Looking Glass mapped itself onto this breakdown I was having. And I think unprocessed grief about my mother dying. And I-

Debbie Millman:

And your world was upside down really.

Sarah Polley:

No, exactly. There were just too many resonances. It was like the whole thing was a metaphor for the life I was living, and this idea of growing bigger and smaller and not knowing whether you were big or small. And there were so many things that were echoes and haunting for me. And so in my addled brain, I realized the only way out of the terror of being on stage is this bigger fear, which is to have the surgery. And if I can tell people that I have to drop out of this play because I’m in agony, because of my back, which I was uncomfortable, but I wasn’t in agony, then I can get out of this play without having to tell anyone I’m afraid. So I ended up going to this orthopedic surgeon. And thank God I got this most beautiful doctor who figured out really quickly that first of all, that I did need the surgery, that I genuinely did need the surgery.

Secondly, that my claims of agonizing pain were actually referring to something else, which was this crippling anxiety about having to go on stage, and that I needed his help in getting out. And without making me say it, he just said to me, “I once had a patient who really needed to start playing baseball. And he wasn’t in that much pain, but he really needed to stop playing baseball. And so he got a note from me so he could stop playing baseball. So would you need a note like that from me?” And I said, “Yeah, I do”, because the surgery wasn’t urgent.

He said, “Well, I’m going to book you in a couple of months and I’m going to give you this note.” And he gave me this note basically saying I had to drop out of the play because of my spine and how much pain I was in. And I got out of the play and it really saved my life. I really don’t know at 15 how out of control I was. But I expect that my life was in danger, in terms of what I would’ve done to get myself out of that play. And I think he saw that and really saved me the trouble of having to tell that story. It was really an amazing moment for me, of him stepping in like that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. I also want to point out that it only became utterly unbearable when the show was extended. When you got that news.

Sarah Polley:

That’s right.

Debbie Millman:

You needed to take action ’cause you were counting down till the end of the run. It was like 10 shows away and then it got extended and-

Sarah Polley:

That’s right. I was think 10 shows away from finally being done after 60 shows. That’s right. And then they said, “We’re doing this extension. We’re taking the show to Toronto.” And I think that’s when I just realized I couldn’t possibly add on more to my tally.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s … Yeah, new subject. During the Gulf War, that happy time, you wore a peace sign to an American award ceremony. And at the time, Disney had picked up the rights to Road to Avonlea for US distribution, and they asked you to change the shirt and you refused. Did that affect your future relationship or at the time the relationship they had with Disney?

Sarah Polley:

I don’t know because it’s so hard to track it. I know that it was some award ceremony in Washington. There were a bunch of senators at my table. And it was my mom’s old big ban the bomb sign, her peace sign from the seventies or something. And I remember them saying, “Maybe you should take that off.” And then I remember getting a call later from an executive at Disney saying, “We’re not a political company. You need to not make political statements.” And I was like, “Well, as a matter of fact, you are quite a political company. If memory serves, you’ve been quite political.” So I don’t know. My memory is that I was brought in for a lot of auditions for Disney movies before that point and none afterwards. But I don’t necessarily trust my 12 or 13-year-old militant activist brain to remember things accurately at that age. But that was my memory. I remember going around saying, “I’ve been blacklisted by Disney”, which I think was a stretch. But I do know that I did have a confrontational conversation with them about it afterwards.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you then did really become a genuine political activist. You handed out leaflets for the Ontario New Democratic Party. You organized a protest against the provincial, progressive conservative government. You lost two back teeth in a fight with the police, supported the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, spoke out against income inequality. And in 1994, even considered studying political science and philosophy at the University at Oxford. At that point, did you see your fame as a distraction from what was really important in the world?

Sarah Polley:

I definitely did, yeah. I knew that I wanted to do something political. I thought that had to do with grassroots organizing. That was absolutely my whole life between the ages of 16 and 18, and then ongoing after that, although I was acting a little bit again by then. But yeah, I couldn’t for the life of me see a life in film or in the arts. I really wanted to be on the ground. I think it was getting to see firsthand what regressive policies could do to people’s lives. So they hacked away at welfare. They hacked away at healthcare, they hacked away at education. And so I really saw the province I lived in change dramatically in a short space of time. So it felt urgent. And I just think, especially at that time in my life, I just couldn’t imagine how you could sleep at night if you weren’t doing everything you could to fight this.

And so I ended up having this really amazing community of activists that took me in and became my family. And I had an amazing political education, really amazing grassroots, direct action organizers. And also a couple of very activist MPPs in our provincial parliament who took me on and mentored me. So I dropped out of school, and every day I would go to the library and read what I’d been instructed to read. And I’d go and have these amazing conversations with politicians and activists. And I just felt like I was getting the most electric education, but also with boots on the ground.

Debbie Millman:

How did you get your two back teeth knocked out? Who did you have a fight with?

Sarah Polley:

This story I think has been exaggerated over the years and probably mostly my fault.

Debbie Millman:

The truth comes out.

Sarah Polley:

Mostly my fault as a teenager in my telling of it. So I did get teeth knocked out. That is true in a riot situation. So there was lines of riot cops in front of us. We had broken over the barriers. We got surrounded by police on horseback on one side, and we were up against this phalanx of riot cops in front of us. And then in this melee, I got one tooth I think was knocked out at the time. And then second one was loosened and came out on the weekend. But here’s the thing that I left out of that story: They were baby teeth and they were already loose. So I totally feel like I lied. Even though it’s true, exacerbated, those teeth were coming out anyway.

Debbie Millman:

But you were already a teenager. What kind of teeth were they? How could they-

Sarah Polley:

No, I was late. I was late. I lost my last baby teeth when I was 19 years old or something ridiculous.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I don’t know. Being hit enough to knock a tooth out despite … It sounds pretty gruesome.

Sarah Polley:

It was better the way I used to tell it where I just got smashed in the face and teeth went flying and blood was everywhere. I miss that story. I miss having no self-awareness.

Debbie Millman:

Well, so this is something I want to talk to you about when we start to talk about the films that you’ve directed, this nature of storytelling and truth and memory and perspective. It’s all so subjective and I think that’s what makes it so interesting. But by the time you were 20, you were cast as the lead role in Cameron Crowe’s film, Almost Famous. At the time, folks were already booking you for the cover of Vanity Fair. It was clearly a superstar making role. You decided to pull out of the movie. You had the part, you were already on set. You decided to pull out and said that the decision was pure survival.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

In what way?

Sarah Polley:

So I think first and foremost, I had a really strong sense that I would not survive being famous generally, that being famous on that level was such a threat to my life and also my identity as I knew it. I think that people survived that type of fame and still maintain some sense of themselves or some integrity or have their relationship still intact, are made up some pretty resilient stuff. I just knew that it wasn’t the life I wanted. The idea of a whole bunch of people that I didn’t know knowing who I was just sounded like a horror show to me. I think also because my early experiences with fame had not been positive, it wasn’t something that I had illusions about. I think also I was a political activist at that time. So the idea that character during the Vietnam War was following around a rock band, was like, “What is she doing? I literally just couldn’t connect if anyway.” And like-

Debbie Millman:

Girl, get a grip.

Sarah Polley:

“She should be on the street. Go get it on the street. What are you doing?” So I think that I just also had trouble with that. And even just being in costume fittings for that role and realizing, “Oh, we’re trying to make this iconic figure for people to be attracted to and for women to want to emulate in some way.” And there was something about it that I started to feel deeply uncomfortable with, and it was a really interesting thing that happened about the time the film came out. I remember having this costume fitting where they put that fur coat on me, that she wears in the film actually. And it was this idea of how do we make her sexualized? And I remember putting on this pair of pants that I really loved and they really showed off my hips, which I was really excited about, ’cause I’d been a really scrawny kid and I had these awesome hips that I was really proud of.

And I remember the costume designer saying, “No, those don’t work.” And then we kept doing some other stuff and then I said, “Can I try those pants on again?” And her saying, “No, you look dumpy, they make you look dumpy.” And I realized that my having hips was a problem in Hollywood. And I just remember in that moment going, “Oh, if I stay here, I’m going to get an eating disorder right away and I’m going to start to hate the things I love about my body, which is the fact that it’s starting to look womanly and curvy.” And it just felt like the beginning of something really destructive. And I remember trying on that fur coat and just this idea of making this character really sexy.

And then I remember when the film came out, Naomi Klein phoned me, who was a friend at the time, and she was at a Radiohead concert. And she said, “Oh my God.” She was like, “You’re right. I’m seeing a lineup out the door right now of groupies wearing that same fur coat.” And this character had become this iconic thing, that these young women had been emulating it. That was my fear I think in playing that part, was that there’s something about this that I don’t want to be part of making this a model for people.

And again, it’s a bit earnest. It’s a bit overly earnest really, when I look back on it and who knows if I’d make the same decision today? But I know that those are my reasons for it. And I do think that I was right that a better life was waiting for me than being really famous. And in fact, not doing that film led to me making my very first short film in the sudden time that I had to myself, and finding my voice as a writer and director. And that was somehow realizing where I was supposed to land.

Debbie Millman:

You went on to write this about the decision to leave the film. I think those moments where you decide not to do something in the face of nobody understanding that decision are the moments that form you, that carve you out. It will always be a part of who I am, how I did that. You also write that after the decision, before starting to work on your own films, you went into a pretty serious depression. How did you manage in and out of that?

Sarah Polley:

I think it was a hard thing to let that many people down. I let a lot of people down when I dropped out of that role. That was the role that everybody wanted and people had worked very hard to get me considered for. And I certainly really disappointed Cameron Crowe and everyone involved in that production, including the producer, Lisa Stewart, who remains a very good friend of mine.

And so I think that that ended up being a really sad feeling. And also there’s a sense of directionless when this thing that you’re supposed to want, you find out you don’t. And so if you don’t want that, what do you want? I did go into a depression and somewhere in that depression, I came up with this idea for a short film. And I’d never thought of writing and directing films before. I’d wanted to be a writer, but not of films. And I started to make it with some friends and with some old crew members I knew. And through the process of that collaboration, just the intensity and joy of that collaboration, I think I really found the path that I wanted to be on.

Debbie Millman:

You shot your first shorts and then went back to school. You graduated from the Canadian Film Center’s directing program and within two years, won a Genie Award for your short, I Shout Love. How did your career as an actress impact your approach to directing?

Sarah Polley:

I think at first, it worked against me. I think at first my experience as an actor actually made me incredibly self-conscious with actors. So I’d be overtalking everything. I’d be constantly funneling the direction I was giving through what my own ears would be and if it would throw me off or not. And I was really overthinking it. And in fact, I strangely think it took me some distancing for myself, from my own experience as an actor, to be able to gain confidence as a director.

But what I do think I really learned from it that was helpful was I grew up listening to film crews complain. And I knew what weighed them really unhappy. I knew what frustrated them. I knew where they felt unacknowledged, unseen and dismissed. I knew how it felt when people worked hours that were too long, when communication was poor. And so that became a really big driving force for me, was to try to create an environment where the working conditions themselves were healthy, which I just feel like isn’t enough of a conversation on film sets, the idea that we actually are responsible for creating a working environment that’s healthy.

Debbie Millman:

I Shout Love is about a couple about to break up. And Tessa, the female lead, convinces her boyfriend Bobby to spend one last night together to make a video reenacting the happy moments in their relationship. And this motif of subjective perspective is embedded in your first two featured directorial efforts, Away From Her, which came out in 2006 and the 2011 film Take This Waltz, both of which garnered awards and accolades. Both films show how feelings of love and longing morph over time. And I realize that the use of time is really embedded in all your films. And I’m wondering, first of all, if you would agree. Time is almost a character in and of itself, as people change and then reckon with those changes almost after the change has occurred.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you. It’s also so fun to get to talk about I Shout Love because no one has seen that movie. Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because what I’m reminded of when you’re talking about it is I always end up having this conversation with Luke Montpelier, who’s my director of photography on most of my films, about the sun being a character and the movement of the sun being a character. And how do we show that? Because it becomes so important, what happens in the course of a day, either in a relationship, or in the case of women talking, in the case of this community’s conversation. And also this idea of different perspectives and looking back at things and people being so sure of their versions of things, especially in relationships. But really everywhere. It’s this idea that we’re clinging to a narrative. We’re rigid with it, we’re immovable with it, we’re holding on tight with white knuckles, and it’s indirect conflict with somebody else’s or everybody else’s narrative. And what do we do with that and how do we make sense of it?

Debbie Millman:

Both Julie Christie and Michelle Williams, the female leads in both movies Away From Her and Take This Waltz, have a complex inner life that in many ways is in direct opposition to how they live outwardly. Do you feel that that’s the case with most people? I get the sense that there’s an aspect of that in most of your lead characters.

Sarah Polley:

I do think I’m deeply interested in that. I’m deeply interested in how incongruous somebody’s life is with the life they’re living. And it’s been really interesting because on this press tour for women talking, I’m meeting so many people and I’m finding the question I keep asking everyone I meet, whether they’re on the team for a studio or working on another film, also on the trail, I always want to know what would you be doing if you weren’t doing this? Or what did you want to do that you didn’t do? And if you could trade your life right now for anything, what would it be? And there’s almost an implosion when you ask the question of a lot of people. A lot of people have an answer to that question that’s both really revealing and often very painful. And you realize most people are not living the life … Not just that they want to in terms of being able to get where they want, but are not making decisions on a day-to-day basis in a way that they feel is true to them.

Whatever their circumstances are and whatever their limitations are, there’s a sense in which there is this gap between who we want to be and who we know ourselves to be, or who we know ourselves to be and who we’re behaving as. And I just think that’s so interesting. Certainly, I feel that all the time, and I think you feel that a lot as a parent. There’s always this deep chasm between who you thought you’d be as a parent and who you actually are on a day-to-day basis. But I think I’m really interested in that space between the life you’re living and who you feel you either should be or who you deeply are.

Debbie Millman:

You did make that decision when you decided to drop out of Almost Famous, which is an interesting metaphor just as a title, and then started to direct. It seems like you did take that stance for yourself, which is one of the most difficult things to do, as somebody that teaches a lot of young people, young undergrads, early grads, that they’re making the decisions that ultimately impact who they become. Taking that first step, that having that courage to live a life that you dream of, is something that most people are deeply afraid of doing.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, I think I was so lucky to have any agency at all when I look back. And I look at so many of the people I knew and friends at the time had no agency at all to change and thinking if they had wanted to. But yeah, I do think that those choices that can be unpopular at the time can so deeply inform the rest of our life, I think in a positive way. And I had it again recently because yes, I’ve been writing and directing films and I love doing it. I think that when I was a child and really consistently throughout my life, what I most want to do is write a book. And I hadn’t done it, and I’d resigned myself to the fact that my life didn’t have space for it.

And I think might have been when I turned 40, when I just went, “So this is just the deal you’ve made with yourself? You always want to do this thing and you’re just not going to do it, ’cause there isn’t space for it. There isn’t time for it. Well, what if you just decided there was? What if you just did that?” And so I think for me, getting to write that book was the biggest thing I’ve ever done for my younger self and my current self. But just that idea of honoring what it is you would’ve done if left your own devices, or if you were lucky enough to get to do what you wanted to do if left your own devices, because I think although I love making films, it is an extension of the life I had as a child and being a child actor, which wasn’t necessarily something that I ran headlong and into or chose.

And so the idea of rewinding and going, “Okay, well if I had some choice, I probably wouldn’t have gone into film at all.” I think my gut is I would’ve gone to university hopefully and maybe studied politics and literature and I think written books, I would hope. And so to get to go and do that just felt really life altering in some essential way.

Debbie Millman:

Well, while we’re on the topic of the book, I was going to ask you about this a little bit later in our conversation. But talk about the title. Talk about the title of your book.

Sarah Polley:

My book is called Run Towards the Danger, and that’s a quote from the amazing Dr. Michael Collins at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And he runs a concussion clinic there. And I had a concussion that lasted on and off for three and a half years. I had a giant fire extinguisher fall off a wall onto my head at a community center after I was swimming one day. And I was in a state of brain fog and headaches and confusion, inability to multitask. Certainly not looking good forever being able to make a film again. Having really intense troubles with night light and noise. And it went on and off for about three and a half years.

And then finally, I went to the UPMC Concussion Clinic. And I saw Michael Collins and so much of the advice … And up until the point of seeing him, had been, whether it be lie down in a dark room or take naps or listen to your body, some people would say, “Take a walk”, and do things. But as soon as you feel your symptoms come on, rest and then don’t go back to it till you feel better. His advice was diametrically opposed to this. So his advice was … And I want to be clear before this advice, he also gave me a very specific regimen of both physical exercise and vestibular exercise. And I can’t ignore that because this advice, I think without that scaffolding is irresponsible.

But with that scaffolding, his advice was, “If you remember nothing else from this meeting today, remember this: Run Towards the Danger. So anything that triggers your symptoms, you need to do more of. Anything that’s uncomfortable for you, anything that causes pain, whether it be light or noise or crowded environments or parties or grocery shopping, the screen time. All of the things that provokes those symptoms, you’ve been avoiding them, and it means your brain has become much weaker at handling them. So you actually have to train that back to health by doing all of the things that make you most uncomfortable.” So this mantra of Run Towards the Danger became the centerpiece of my recovery, where I had to just run headlong into the things that I’ve avoided for years in order to protect myself. And the only way I could get better was by doing more of them. So of course, this was a huge paradigm shift for me in my life and ended up permeating every aspect of it, in a really beautiful life changing way. And I was completely better in six weeks.

Debbie Millman:

It’s really incredible. The full title of your book is Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, which is just such a stunning title. And it includes pieces on your childhood career. Obviously, the devastating concussion injury and the painstaking recovery, your own sexual assault by a journalist years earlier and the aftermath. One of the things that I often talk to my students about is the notion of confidence. And they’re all very sure that they’ll do something that they really want to do when they find the confidence. I’ve come to realize that confidence is really just the successful repetition of any endeavor. So the more you do something, the more likely it is, you’ll get better at it and then develop confidence. You can’t just go and get confidence off the shelf. And it seems like running towards the danger is putting yourself in a position to begin to confront the things that you maybe feel are dangerous, but ultimately help define who you are.

Sarah Polley:

And this notion that you do something alongside your anxiety. You don’t wait for it to pass, you don’t wait for the confidence to come, you don’t wait to stop being anxious. You do it at the same time as feeling the anxiety. And I think we have this conversation around anxiety right now I feel culturally, that has to do with overcoming it so that we can do something or solving it so that we can move forward, or listening to our body and honoring our anxiety. And I actually feel like, “No.” It may be your companion. It doesn’t mean you don’t keep going. You don’t wait for it to leave. It may never leave. But I think you’re right. I do think that … I think Callie Khouri said this once, the writer of Thelma & Louise, where she said to a bunch of young writers and directors, “The only difference between the people you respect and you is they’re doing it anyway.” They’re terrified and have all the same doubts. They’re just doing it anyway.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, you talk about that in actually the essay about your stage fright when you were younger and how you were so interested in how Barbara Streisand had been able to manage … How it took her 30 years to get over the stage fright to begin performing again, because she forgot the words to a song that she was performing live in Central Park when she was practically a teenager, and then how she managed to move through that. I don’t know that you ever get over things like that. You just have to live with them and act as if it’s okay to do it anyway.

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, and it’s interesting how these things come and go because I found recently I’ve had to be on stage so much in the last six months of traveling with women talking and make speeches and be on stage I feel like sometimes four and five times a week. And I’m just suddenly not afraid of being on stage anymore. This has plagued me my whole life, and suddenly it’s just gone. I literally just sit there and wait for it almost like I’m lonely for it, for the anxiety to come before I go on stage.

I’m waiting for my buddy, Terror, and he just doesn’t show up anymore. And I just think I’ve done it so much that it exhausted me. And so it’s funny because so much of the advice around anxiety is to move away from the triggers. And that must be appropriate in some situations when things are really acute or where there’s some kind of PTSD. In my case, I find not moving away from those triggers, but actually doing more of the thing that I’m finding difficult, has been key. And it came directly from that concussion recovery of, “Let’s find more triggers. Let’s make a game of this and let’s do it.”

Debbie Millman:

In Take This Waltz, the character that Michelle Williams plays so beautifully, has quirks that she only shows her husband. She likes baby talk. They also have a really unique way of articulating their love for each other with these profoundly violent almost insults. And it’s heartbreaking when she tries to reenact this way of communicating with the man she leaves her husband for. And I’m wondering if you think that we all show up as the same person over and over again in our relationships?

Sarah Polley:

I think yes and no. I have a friend who always says, “We find someone who will take us and then we reveal ourselves”, which I love. Because I do think at the beginning of the relationship, I think what people fall in love with isn’t just the other person, but the promise of being someone else than someone better ourselves. And then I think so much of when people feel they’ve fallen out of love has to do with, often not always, is to do with this sinking realization that you are still yourself, that you haven’t been fundamentally altered.

So it’s also falling in love with an image of yourself. I think that is true, but I also do think that for me anyway, there have been relationships in which I have felt the support to grow and evolve and be the best version of myself. And I would say specifically the relationship I’m in now, which I had not been in for very long when I made Take This Waltz. So I think that it’s not like all relationships are created equal, and it’s just us no matter where we go. I do think people give us the space and the room to grow, and some others don’t. But I do think it is a crushing moment when you realize that the parts that you don’t like about yourself have followed you into a relationship you thought was going to solve that.

Debbie Millman:

Michelle Williams character feels very dependent on who she’s in love with. And at the end, it’s a little bit ambiguous. She goes back to reenact a happy moment with the man she left her husband with by herself and goes on an amusement park ride that was particularly magical. And you play the same song, the song by The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and it’s a little bit ambiguous. I wasn’t sure if she was finally content being on her own or if she was just longing for the past. And given my opportunity to ask you about it firsthand, I figured I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for this spoiler.

Sarah Polley:

Sure. It’s funny because I saw this debate online about this moment recently between people who thought one thing and someone else who thought she was just really happy in her new relationship, and this person was being taken down by these other people. And so I re-watched it because I was trying to remember what I intended. And I think that there’s everything in that moment. So she’s writing the scrambler. And I think what we see across her face is sadness and emptiness and a sense of being alone and resignation to that, and joy at discovering that she can live with that. And an ability to suddenly be present in the moment of this beautiful experience while knowing it’s not going to solve anything for very long. And I think in my mind, in that moment, what she’s really experiencing is the reality of impermanence.

I think the whole film for me was really inspired by Buddhist philosophy and people like Pema Chodron, who talk so much about there being a gap in life and this idea of emptiness. And so I liked the idea of we see a character at the beginning of a film and there’s a feeling of emptiness. And so she completely rearranges her entire life and starts a new life in order to fill that emptiness and ends up where she began with emptiness, because it is part of the reality of life. So in my mind at the end, there is a profound sadness that she hasn’t been able to solve that emptiness, but also a communion with it and acceptance of it, and moments of passing delight, which I think is what she realizes she can hope for in this life.

Debbie Millman:

I love that. Views of shared reality are reflected again in your remarkable 2012 documentary Stories We Tell, where you challenge the idea that any one narrative can accurately portray and reflect reality. And this came with your shocking news that your family wasn’t quite what you thought it was. And I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about the plot of the film of this documentary.

Sarah Polley:

Sure. So I found out when I was 27 years old that the man who raised me, my dad, who I’ve been talking about, was not my biological father, and that my mom had had an affair with a man named Harry Gaulkin in Montreal in 1978, and they had conceived me. And I was raised as part of my family with my siblings not knowing this. There had always been rumors that I was the child of some actor in some play maybe, but it was really a joke. It never was really serious. What was interesting was that after this happened, there was this revelation and my dad found out, my siblings found out. I would start to hear people tell the story to others. And the stories that we were telling were very little relation to each other. Even down to the details of how I found out my biological father was my biological father.

Everything had been shifted or changed, or details were missing or added. In many ways, I felt in order to help fit into the context of the narrative that that particular person in our family had about our family. So I became really interested in the idea of capturing all of the competing and conflicting and sometimes complimentary narratives about the same event in a family. And this idea of a story told not by one voice, but by a chorus of voices. So I was just interested in looking at all the different ways we fictionalize and shift and change the details of our narratives, not willfully and not intentionally, but out of some sense that there is a narrative we are somewhat attached to. There’s a story, there’s a meaning we’re attached to, that everything must slot into, and the way we do this unconsciously. It just got its talents into me. And I got so excited about the idea of capturing my dad’s version, capturing Harry’s version, capturing all of my siblings version, and having them tell the story in these conflicting ways.

Debbie Millman:

What did making that movie help you understand about the nature of truth and memory, whether it be others’ versions or your own?

Sarah Polley:

It’s a good question. I think I became less dogmatic about truth and more interested in what people need emotionally to survive. People were telling the stories that had meaning to them and sometimes they weren’t right. But it didn’t make it not okay from my point of view for them to live alongside that story that they were telling. It was a lot of I think staying out of the way. I think one of the things that I loved about the process was I had to sit with each of my family members and really listen. And when you’re making a documentary, a really great tip I got from another documentary filmmaker was when someone finishes answering a question, don’t jump in with your next question, because it’s entirely possible they’ll want to fill that space. And in that space, what they might give you is far more potent and unintentional than what their constructed answer might be.

And how often do we do that with our family if they tell a version of events we don’t agree with? We jump in, we correct, we argue, or we say, “Actually I remember it this way.” But to actually have to listen and to hear people go to the end of a story and leave those silences and let it be their version and not impose my own, you learn a tremendous amount that you’ve missed about how people think and feel and who they really are. And I think there’s so much about our families, where they have remained strangers to us in a way that so many others wouldn’t because we’re imposing layers and layers of years and years of small interactions that build into one monolithic narrative that we then ride a bull around that relationship. And so to have this very delicate space of listening and finding out where you’ve just been entirely wrong is really interesting.

I actually had a really interesting experience with a family member recently, which for me, shone a light on this whole experience, where I talked to a family member recently about something that was happening to me that was exciting. And then I was inviting them to come stay at my cottage. And they were giving me responses that I’m used to over the years of, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And in my mind, I knew exactly what was going on in this person’s head. What was going on in this person’s head was, “Why do I have to hear about this great thing that’s happening to you? I don’t care. And yeah, sure, I’d love to come to the cottage.” This person was never going to come to the cottage and they were humoring me. And I could just feel the cynicism and the judgment dripping.

It’s someone I actually have a very good relationship with, but I know that there’s parts of me that irritate them and these were present in the conversation. And then the most astonishing thing happened. They hung up the phone, but they didn’t hang up. And I was just about to hang up and I realized they hadn’t hung up. And I suddenly heard them call out to someone else in their household and say, “I just talked to Sarah.” And I thought, “Oh God, I’m going to hear all the criticism that I’ve always known is there. But they’ve never said out loud.” This is an openly critical person. And what they did was they conveyed to this person how excited they were for me about this thing that had happened to me, and how excited they were to come that summer to my cottage. And it was so palpable, the joy in their voice and the pride and the excitement about seeing me.

And I realized that I had for my entire life been reading a narrative into this person’s tone of voice and gesture that did not exist. And it was so horrifying. I’m not somebody who’s constantly reading in negative things to the people I know. But this was just something I knew from probably 800,000 misunderstandings built up over decades. I had created a narrative that wasn’t true. And the only way I would’ve ever known that would be to have been able to hear this thing I wasn’t supposed to hear after a phone call they hadn’t hung up on properly. And so for me, that’s actually in many ways what Stories We Tell is about. But it was an amazing moment for me to realize I’m still doing it. I’m still mapping and projecting stories about relationships onto people that aren’t real. And we all do that every day in ways we don’t get to have the big reveal that we were wrong.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. How did the realization about who fathered you biologically impact how you felt about your mother and your father?

Sarah Polley:

I think at first, I felt tremendously guilty for finding it out. And it actually took a close friend of mine after months of just feeling terribly guilty for finding this out to say, “Do you understand that by finding out this information, you didn’t cause anything? You didn’t actually make this happen. You’re not responsible for your mother’s affair. This isn’t something that you did or that you’re responsible for that is in any way bad.” And I didn’t know that. I thought by finding the information out that I had somehow hurt my father. I didn’t tell my dad for a long time. I actually didn’t tell him until a journalist threatened to print the story who had heard it from somebody else. And so that was actually the impetus for telling my dad in the first place. I think with my mom, oh my God. My mom was one of that generation of women who was expected to do all of the housework, all of the cooking and cleaning, all of the childcare and provide half of the income to the family.

So she worked crazy hours in a profession that was incredibly dismissive and horrible to women. She had absolutely no support at home. We didn’t have help in anything. So she’s running around vacuuming and cleaning and dusting and trying to get meals on the table and doing all the grocery shopping because my dad also didn’t drive. She’s waiting hand on foot on kids and a husband. And I just think any joy that woman got in her life, I feel no judgment for. So if she went away and did a play for a couple of months in Montreal and got to feel herself and have joy and not have to be responsible for everybody in the world for five seconds, I find that really hard to judge. I’m a big fan of monogamy in my own life. I live a very different life than my mother did, with a lot more freedom and agency and support and an equal partner in everything.

So I just think I can’t find it in my heart to judge her on any moral grounds, that she had a beautiful affair and kept that for herself. I think that many people would’ve just snapped and not been able to care for their kids with that kind of pressure. And if this what is helped her get through, good for her. And she lived a short life. My oldest brother always says that. He always says she only lived till she was 53, and I’m so glad she had some fun while she was here.

Debbie Millman:

Your voice is mostly in the background of Stories We Tell. And in many ways it feels like your father Michael’s film as he does most of the narration. Can you talk about that decision?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, sure. So I really fell in love with my dad’s voice in this film. And I think in part because when the revelations first came out, people were saying, “You should make a film. It’s so interesting.” And I thought “It’s not though.” I’ve seen the movie before of someone fighting their biological father and it’s very interesting in my life, but that to me isn’t a cinematic experience or particularly original. But what was interesting was my dad’s response, which was one of absolutely no judgment towards my mom. In a way, all of his failings as a father suddenly disappeared and he suddenly was this person who was incredibly concerned with taking care of people. He was deeply upset that my mother had felt that she had had to keep this secret and carried that with her until the end of her life, and that she couldn’t have relied on him to understand and be okay with it.

He was worried about me taking on any kind of guilt about it. He was excited for me to get to know my biological family. He was just extremely magnanimous and did a lot of self-reflection about ways in which he had not supported her or been an equal partner. And he was just an extraordinary thing to see him do. So that became interesting to me. And then the difference between his version and Harry’s version and my sibling’s versions became deeply interesting to me.

And the way we were clearly fabricating or making things up about the story to suit whatever overall narrative we had about our lives, was really interesting. So I became much more interested in other people’s voices than my own. My version of that story actually isn’t in the film, and who knows if I’ll ever even tell it. It’s very different from all the versions that are in the movie. And what was interesting is I think that suited everybody just fine because then I wrote my book, which is really just my version, which was a lot trickier I think for people, because suddenly it wasn’t, “Okay, I’m giving this narrative to everybody except myself.” It’s like this is my story, and that’s a lot harder for people’s stomach, I think.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, what was so interesting to me, I saw the movie before I read Run Towards the Danger. And the Michael in the movie and the Michael in Run Towards the Danger almost felt like two different people. I was also astounded by his magnanimous response to your mother’s relationship with Harry and your subsequent birth. He was very willing to take on the responsibility of that need in her, because of his own lack of participation in the marriage at times. But the Michael in Run Towards the Danger was far more complex and tricky to like.

Sarah Polley:

And I think we all probably are that way. I think probably all of us could have a story written about us in which we do seem magnanimous and almost heroic, and we could have a story written about us that would make us seem monstrous or … Maybe not. I don’t think my dad seems monstrous, but that focused on our failings. And I think we are many things, and my dad was certainly many things. He was this incredibly tolerant, philosophical, unjudgmental, progressive, beautiful person. A brilliant writer, able to take responsibility for his part in what happened in his marriage that led to this affair. And he was also someone who was deeply negligent of a child and crossed a lot of boundaries you shouldn’t have and let me down. And so I think at various points, he let me down terribly, and he really did come through in this moment.

So because the film is about that moment, I let him shine as brightly as he did in that moment. I don’t think I would’ve written the more difficult stories about my dad when he was alive. But I can’t imagine wanting him to be exposed in that way before his death. It doesn’t affect him now, and it does affect me deeply, to be able to tell the truth of my life and to not have to be protecting him anymore, I think is really important for me.

But I also weirdly don’t think he’d argue with any of it. One of his only big criticism of Stories We Tell was, “You’ve made me look like a saint and I’m not.” We all know I really let you down in so many ways, and this is a fiction. I was like, “Well, the movie is about many versions and this is one version of you. And it is true actually that you are this great in this moment.” But I don’t know how much he would argue with the portrait painted in Run Towards the Danger. I think that I would be more concerned about telling that story when he was alive because I don’t think he would be prepared for other people’s reactions to it.

Debbie Millman:

At the end of the film, Michael narrates the following, and I’m going to read this verbatim because I like it so much: “And there is a fly buzzing around me as I write. It will buzz around looking for food, and once sustained, it may seek a mate. It will never know why. It’s just simply been sentenced to follow the demands of millions of ancestors for that fly. The word why does not exist. I will go on. I will go on.” I felt that to be one of the most beautiful yet heartbreaking parts of the film. And I’m wondering do you have the same response? Can you talk about what that meant to you, that little snippet?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah. I think my dad was someone who really was comfortable with the chaos and absurdity of life and the not knowing and the meaningless. For him, I think life was meaningless and yet that didn’t bother him. It was part of its beauty, is that we are just here for a minute. And I think he was also someone who just delighted in small things like a beautiful cup of tea and a book, and he didn’t need a lot to be happy. And so a lot of the film, he’s looking at this fly and imagining its thoughts. And something like that would give my dad pleasure for weeks.

Hee was able to just hone in on something philosophically and live there and need very little else. And he was a beautiful person to spend time with for that reason. It was a beautiful brain to get to be inside. And it’s funny because for all of the problems with him as a parent, as a kid, he was one of the people I most liked spending time with as an adult. I think so much for his capacity to just get lost in the joy of a thought or a concept, and his excitement about being lost in his mind.

Debbie Millman:

Your latest directorial effort, the film Women Talking is out now. It’s nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Adapted Screenplay for the screenplay that you wrote, and one for Best Picture of the Year. It’s up against films like Avatar and Elvis and Top Gun. Congratulations on-

Sarah Polley:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

This remarkable showing. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, and it’s about a group of Mennonite women in Bolivia who are trying to figure out what to do after discovering that men in their community have been using a cow tranquilizer to knock them out and rape them. The victims include a four-year-old baby as well as women of all ages, including women that are elderly. What attracted you to this story?

Sarah Polley:

So I think that I was so drawn to this idea of this conversation that this group of women have, this group of women in this community who are basically elected to decide whether they’re going to stay and fight or if they’re going to leave, or if they’re going to stay and forgive the men and do nothing. And these women come together, many of whom don’t agree with each other on this fundamental question, and they have to sit together and come to some consensus. And it was this incredible act of radical democracy of what democracy should actually look like, if we’re forced to contend with each other and each other’s very uncomfortable positions and beliefs, and have to find a way forward.

I found the debate so alive and electric and the premise so hopeful, having to figure out what is the way forward. Not just reckoning with the harms that have happened, which is something they also have to do and find language for, but also what’s next. And there’s a pivotal moment where Ona says, Rooney Mara’s character says, “Perhaps it would be useful to think not only what it is we want to destroy, but also what we want to build.” And I think that in this conversation about not just gender-based violence but systemic injustice and looking at inequity and this idea of looking forward and looking for what’s next, just felt to me like water in the desert.

Debbie Millman:

I understand that the visual language of the film was inspired by the first serious piece of art that you bought over 20 years ago by the Canadian photographer Larry Towell. Can you talk about how it influenced the film?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, so I was obsessed with this series of photographs for so long. And it’s a book you can get called The Mennonites by Larry Towell. They’re these incredible, very respectful, compassionate, beautiful photographs of Mennonites living in very conservative traditional colonies. And I’ve had a lot of interactions with Mennonite colonies over the years in a certain area of Ontario that I went to a lot. So I have Mennonite friends. It’s a faith and a culture that I’ve always been deeply interested in, especially the focus on the collective and the lack of individualism and the lack of materialism.

And there’s just been a lot that I think I’ve learned from those communities. And so these photographs were really important to me. And so a lot of the imagery in the film was inspired by Larry’s photos. And there’s a general tone of respect that I really wanted to emulate too. We’re telling a really horrific story about something that did happen in a Mennonite colony, at least the background events did in Bolivia in the early 2000s. And because we were telling such a difficult story, it was really important for me to focus on also the beautiful aspects of this culture and to have that be part of the package as well.

Debbie Millman:

In your film, the characters articulate the broad range of responses to trauma, anger, resignation, collapse, silence, and explore how some victims of abuse judge others for having different responses than their own, or for falling apart in the ways that they feel they haven’t been allowed to for themselves. And this is something that my wife also explores in her book, Not That Bad: Essays on Rape Culture. And it breaks my heart that women not only judge the trauma response of others, but also the trauma response of themselves as if there’s some prescribed way to grieve or to suffer. And I thought that the way in which you portrayed the various responses to be very empathetic.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you. And of course, Roxane’s work has been a huge influence on me and certainly was very present in my mind as I was making this film. What I loved about Miriam’s book and what I tried to translate to the screen was this idea that there’s not one valid response. That there’s this myriad of responses to this violence that ranged from anger to sadness, to paralysis, to equanimity, to fury, to a sense of just desperately wanting to maintain the status quo of not wanting to confront, of wanting to confront, and that all of these would be understood equally. So one of the things that was most important to me in my process was taking the time to write a draft from each character’s point of view as though they were the only important character in the room. And I did that twice, just to make sure that I am really feeling this story through their eyes.

So whether it’s a character that I feel connected to or not, by the end of that process, I had to understand and empathize with every moment of what they said and did through only their eyes. One of the things I love about, for instance, Sidney Lumet’s movies, is I think what you can sense in his movies, is that he just loves all his characters. So even if their behavior is really hard to understand or maybe even offensive, he has clearly taken the time to not judge them and to understand them. And so that for me, I’ve never heard him talk about that, but that’s what I get from his films.

And so that became endemic for me, this idea that I’m going to love all of these characters [inaudible 01:17:28] and love what they do. I’m going to love what they say. Even if it’s not productive, even if it’s destructive, I’m going to understand through their point of view, not my own, because I do think this idea of the perfect victim has been so damaging to so many of us who’ve gone through this, both exactly in terms of other people’s judgments of us, but also our judgments of ourselves and how self-critical we can be about not responding the way we think we should have.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, think back when you were a little girl, thinking you were responsible for your mother’s death. Of course, we think we’re responsible for anything bad that might happen to us because that’s the way we’re raised now I want to talk to you about Francis McDormand’s character because you do want to love her. Just what you said about writing the film from even her perspective. And this little bit of a spoiler alert here, so cover your ears if you haven’t seen the film, Francis McDormand chooses not to go with the rest of the women. Why?

Sarah Polley:

Yeah, and it’s interesting. So we changed this actually from even how we shot it. So originally, her character who is on the site of stay and do nothing and forgive the men, she and her family end up not being in the [inaudible 01:18:45] for the conversation because they think it’s against God to even have the conversation. And the way the film used towards the end was her character is actually running to a buggy to go to the city to alert the men. And Salome, Claire Foy’s character, who’s actually had to use the tranquil … Again, plug your ears if you haven’t seen the film. But has to tranquilize her son in order to take him with them, which is actually breaking a lot of rules that they’ve set out for themselves in terms of being pacifists about this. Also, in this original version, they used the cow tranquilizer on Francis McDormand’s character, stop her from going to the city to tell the men. And so her agency was taken away in that moment.

And what we changed it to is we didn’t have Claire go on this kind of spree. It was just very specifically to bring her son with her. And it was very late in the editing process. We were almost finished the movie and we suddenly realized we had this shot of Francis watching the hayloft from way earlier in the movie. And we just got really interested in the idea of what does it look like to actually sit on her face as though she’s watching the wagons go off and the buggies go off and she’s not part of it. And what I loved about what that did is I think that it did make you feel more for her in that moment. So it wasn’t just this enemy they’d had to defeat to go off.

And I really have issues in general in movies with the concept of villains. I think it’s a really harmful concept. I don’t think we should have them. I think we can have people do terrible awful things, but I think if we don’t seek to understand some part of their humanity, we’re just doing all of us a great disservice. And I think what we had done is we’ve made her too much of a villain. And I think in choosing that moment of her looking off and just trying to read her face as she sees her whole community leave without her, as she tries to maintain this religious order in her mind that is going to be so harmful to her, I think it got us one step closer to empathizing with her in some way.

And I think because that side is not that well represented in the film, the stay and do nothing, people aren’t that well represented because they’ve actually lost the vote before the film even starts, it was really important to have the best actors possible to play those parts. People we could love in an instant or at least wonder about in an instant, because we weren’t going to get to spend much time with them.

Debbie Millman:

Francis McDormand’s face in that shot is … It actually reminds me a little bit of the amount of emotion conveyed in living in that space that Michelle Williams has at the end of Take This Waltz. It’s just so much of the human dilemma right there. That’s what we contend with as we live. One of the things that I found really interesting was how you stated that you were more interested in exploring the culpability of systems that allow violence against women to happen than in judging individual men. And I thought that Ona’s decision to bring her son was a really hopeful sign that there could be a different way of behaving, and there could be a different way of thinking about entitlement and agency. And I loved that she went to that effort to bring him along.

Sarah Polley:

I am a tremendously hopeful person, and I have not always been. And I would say that’s something that’s really developed in the last few years. And part of that has been the unwritten and most useful articles and essays of the Me Too movement that will never be written, I don’t think, were the private conversations that a lot of men were having with themselves, some of which I got to hear. So I got this amazing window through a couple of people I knew into what it felt like to reframe things, have language for things, realize things that had felt like coming onto someone was actually the way you were doing it had actually felt like harassment and oppressive, realizing that something had crossed a line with something that you had interpreted a different way. I think that there were people who had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about what they had done. Not because they were scared of being caught, but because they realized they had created harm. And will never get to read those essays, sadly.

So I don’t think anyone’s going to be brave enough to write them, but I think they happen, and I think they happen more than we know. And I did see a transformation in a few people. Not everybody, and God knows a lot of people just ended up running scared and being terrified they were going to get caught and did everything to protect themselves. So it’s not all like roses. But I do think that we are capable of looking at ourselves and of some kind of accountability. And I do think that it’s possible to learn different roles for ourselves and having different expectations for others in terms of what the expectations are in terms of gender. I just think that we’re capable of great change. I’ve seen it enough in my life that I believe it. And I’m not coming from a place of being totally naive either. I’ve obviously experienced great harm as well. But I just feel incredibly hopeful based on what I’ve seen in my life, that there is a chance for transformation and change at least.

Debbie Millman:

Women Talking is a remarkable film. And I know a lot of people that are going to be rooting for you on Oscar night. So-

Sarah Polley:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Our fingers and toes are crossed. I have one last question for you, and it’s about politics. I read that you sometimes consider dedicating more time to politics. And for some reason, age 57 is planted in your brain as the year you’ll make a more concerted move in that direction. And I’m wondering if you still feel that way.

Sarah Polley:

So 57 is the age I’ll be when my youngest is 18, because I have friends who are in politics who have little kids and it just looks so hard. And I think it’s so important for people with young kids to be in politics. And so I don’t want it knock that. I think it’s amazing. I just know that I don’t think I would have the energy for it. I do think about it a lot. I don’t know. I think I used to think maybe I was interested in some elected role. Not leadership, but maybe some role as an MPP in Ontario. I think now, I’m not certain how well I would do with the willful misrepresentation of things that I said or the actual malice that comes at you on a daily basis.

Just the tiny whispers I’ve experienced of that, I really get through the day and through my life dependent on my very steadfast belief that people are intrinsically good no matter what their behavior tells us, that deep down we’re really good. And I think many moments in a politician’s life I think would challenge that so intensely that it might really be hard on me psychically. So I’m not sure if it would be such a public rule, but I do feel like over the course of my life generally, and before 57 too, I would like to be dedicating a substantial amount of time to things I believe in. And here, it would be the fight to preserve universal public healthcare and a massive reinvestment in education and in public schools and homelessness, which is increasingly an issue here.

Debbie Millman:

Sarah Polley, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sarah Polley:

Thank you so much. This podcast means so much to me and I listen to it so regularly, and I’m astonished that I’m here in getting to talk to you. So thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. I am astonished as well and so grateful. Sarah Polley’s most recent film is Women Talking. It is nominated for two Academy Awards. Good luck with both. We are all so hoping you win. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman. I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Best of Design Matters: Sarah Polley appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Who doesn’t love romantic comedy? When it’s good, a romcom scratches itches we forgot we even had, for human connection in a world that seems designed to frustrate it, for things to actually work out in spite of the obstacles we face. And yes, for the sheer pleasure and experience of joy. Kyra Sedgwick’s latest directorial effort, Space Oddity, scratches all those itches with a little sci-fi thrown in the movie mix.

Kyra Sedgwick has had an extraordinary career in front of the camera since the 1980s, both in film and television, including her award-winning role as Brenda Leigh Johnson on the long-running television show, The Closer. Kyra Sedgwick has also been behind the camera, directing quite a lot of episodic television, but Space Oddity is the first narrative feature film she’s directed. She joins me today from Los Angeles to talk about her acting career, and her brand new directorial debut. Kyra Sedgwick, welcome to Design Matters.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Thank you so much. So happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Kyra, I understand you have a fear of food that looks like people. What is that about?

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s not quite that. I have a gag reflex that gets triggered when I see food anthropomorphized.

Debbie Millman:

Anthropomorphic food, yes.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Thank you. And for instance, yesterday I went to my neighborhood movie theater, which is this tiny, funky movie theater called Los Feliz 3, and it is in my funky neighborhood in Los Angeles, and they have this old-fashioned, go to the snack bar, and the popcorn bag is dancing, and the soda is cha-chaing, and it just doesn’t work for me. I literally feel like I’m going to gag and will have to look away.

Debbie Millman:

Apparently, you’re not the only person who has this fear. It even has an official phobia name. It is cibolasiphobia.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I’m so glad I’m not alone. I feel like I’m not alone in this. I feel like this must gross other people out as well.

Debbie Millman:

I’ll have to check if it’s in the DSM of official ailments, but I thought you’d appreciate knowing that.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I really do.

Debbie Millman:

Kyra, you were born and raised in New York City, as was I, Your mom was a therapist, and your dad was a venture capitalist. And I understand that you’re also a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Which signer are you related to?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Gosh, you know what? I should know their name, which is pretty… My father is rolling in his grave. “How could you not know?” I think it might be John Sedgwick, but I don’t know. I think it was a general. I also know that one of the guys in the movie Glory also is one of my progenitors. I think it might even be in the Matthew Broderick character, I don’t know. But all I know is that in my teens, my father was like, “See Glory. You have to see Glory.” It was the only movie he told us we had to see.

Debbie Millman:

You’re the youngest of six children, and you’ve said that your older brothers, Rob and Niko, toughened you. I’m wondering, in what way?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh my God, in every way. They were mercilessly… They teased me mercilessly. My brother Rob really was nearly violent with me. Not even nearly, his favorite pastime was strangling me and my brother, or saying, “We’re going to time you. Go get me a grilled cheese sandwich. We’re going to time you.” Making you do dumb things. And then as if that wasn’t bad enough, they would throw in all this love, occasionally, but that was only occasional. And they would, most of the time, sort of gang up on me. And I think that it helped me realize at an early age, yes, indeed, it is a man’s world, and get used to it.

Debbie Millman:

Do you have any sisters? Or all of your-

Kyra Sedgwick:

I do. I do.

Debbie Millman:

… other siblings brothers?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I have two I sisters, but I didn’t get them until later on, until I was about six. So then I realized how great that could be. And just as a PS, my brothers and I are incredibly close now, and we were close as kids. It’s just that my mother didn’t do any… It was in the 70s and 80s. It was the benign neglect theory of parenting.

Debbie Millman:

Your parents divorced when you were four years old, and your mom remarried an art dealer when you were six, and you’ve said that as a result, you became a keen observer of human nature. You’d watch people talk and study their eyebrows, and their bodies, and felt a lot of responsibility for everyone you knew, and how they felt. That’s a really big burden for a little girl to carry. How did you manage?

Kyra Sedgwick:

How did I manage? I managed by thinking I had a lot of control. I think that’s how I managed, because I think that I felt so out of control and things felt so chaotic, that I had to convince myself for my own survival that I could control things. And then occasionally, you get these little wins and you’re like, “I did control it. I can do it again.” It’s sort of an okay thing to think when you’re younger, but as you get older, you realize what a horrible burden that is. As I’ve grown, I’ve definitely grown out of that, and realized that it was a burden, but at the time, I think it felt like a superpower.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I’ve read that. I’ve read quite a lot about how children that have been through traumatic experiences very young tend to become hyper aware in an effort, both to control things as best as they can, but also to be prepared for catastrophic things that still might be coming.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Absolutely.

Debbie Millman:

I also understand that you were a serious tomboy. Instead of playing with dolls, you’d spend hours playacting. At one point, you were a ballet teacher dancing around your room. You said you were not a happy kid. Did you spend a lot of time alone, aside from getting beaten up by your brothers?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah. I think I did spend [inaudible 00:06:38]. I did spend a lot of time alone, for sure. Again, I think it was the 70s and 80s, and I think that parents didn’t really do what they do now, which is insist on family dinners, or just show up in a different, more present way. I think that my parents did better than their parents, but I think that, yeah, I had a lot of time alone. I also watched a ton of television, that was a real healing balm for me, which ultimately was actually a good thing for my work. But it was lonely. It definitely wasn’t a happy childhood really until 12, which sounds really young, but when I fell in love with acting, that was when things really shifted for me, and I had a dream, I had a goal, I had a passion, and that helped me a lot, find connection within myself and others.

Debbie Millman:

What made you decide to try out for that eighth grade school production of Fiddler on the Roof?

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s pretty funny, actually. That’s actually a great question, because I remember when I signed up to audition thinking, “Who do I think I am that I can play this character in this show, or what makes me think that I can get up on a stage and make people look at me?” But I guess I must have had a little guardian angel or something, or there was something in me that was calling me to that. And I remember after I auditioned, my English teacher, who at the time did not think of much of me, I can tell you that right now, because I was a bit of a hippie, actually, at 12, looked at me and said, “Oh my God, you sing like a bird,” he said to me, and I remember thinking, “Is that good? Is that a good thing?”

Debbie Millman:

So did Joni Mitchell, by the way.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah. And so yeah, my English teacher was the drama teacher, as is often the case in these kinds of schools. And I got this great part, and that was it. I was happy all the time, especially when I got to rehearsal. And actually, on the days that I didn’t have rehearsal, I wasn’t so happy. But the days that I did it was like, “Oh my God, this is it. This is everything.”

Debbie Millman:

Now, before you even tried out for the play, I read that you didn’t think that you were talented in any way. And in fact, you thought you were rather mediocre. Was that something that you were sort of self-creating? Or was that something that you were told?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Truly, my stepfather was a very exacting serious man. He had what is still considered one of the greatest artistic eyes that there ever have been.

Debbie Millman:

He’s a great art dealer, yeah. Collector.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Great art dealer, yeah. He bought the first Jackson Pollocks, the first Rothkos, the first Jasper Johns, Rauschenbergs, Barnett Newmans, he was a serious connoisseur, and if he could spot it, you got it. And he was also highly intellectual. And I think that when we moved into his home at age six, my dad, who had been like, “Everything you do is great,” and, “Hey, we’re all playing touch football and playing tag, and you don’t have to be special in any way. I just think you’re the pips because you’re mime, because you’re a kid and you’re adorable, and I love you,” it became much more exacting, and I felt criticized on a very profound level constantly.

And so he was critical of all of us, and probably himself. Now I can look back with so much empathy, but all of a sudden when someone’s looking at you like that, you start going, “Oh, well, I really am not really that special or worthwhile or anything.” And we weren’t focused on, so that probably also had a lot to do with feeling like I wasn’t interesting enough to be focused on. That all changed so profoundly in almost a really uncomfortable way when I was 12 and I was in that play. Suddenly, my parents were like, “Oh my God, you’ve got this enormous talent.” And all of a sudden their eyes were on me. And it was almost terrifying, in a way.

Debbie Millman:

I read something that I just was so moved by, about your reaction to being on stage at that age, and you said, “I felt like my soul had left my body and was dancing around the stage.” What a profound experience to have in a lifetime.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh, God, it really was. It was.

Debbie Millman:

And then you got your first gig as a player on the soap opera, Another World. And I understand your mother had a close friend from college, a man named Philip Carlson, who was a manager, and she said, “Yes, you could audition,” because she didn’t think you’d get it, and then you got it. What was that like at 16 years old to be auditioning for a major television show?

Kyra Sedgwick:

It was crazy. I wanted it desperately. Between 12 and 16, I had decided this was definitely what I was going to be doing with my life, and I had pursued it in the ways that I could pursue it. I went to acting camp, and I studied at HB Studios, and I was taking it very seriously, but I didn’t think about actually pursuing it professionally at that young age, until this friend of my mother’s was like, “How about you just audition ‘for fun’, and see what happens just to give you practice in auditioning?” And I was like, “Yes.” And my parents said it was okay, and so yeah, I auditioned, and I felt in my element. I don’t think I even felt scared. I think I was like, “Well, I got this.” And I did get this. And then doing the actual show was amazing. It was life changing, and it was… It’s a very professional atmosphere. They’re not going to cut you any slack because you’re 16. And so a lot was expected of me, and I was excited to live up to that.

Debbie Millman:

Your first on-screen television appearance was on January 15th, 1982. You played a 16-year-old, Julia Shearer, the troubled granddaughter of Liz Matthews, the soap’s matriarch. What was the experience of becoming a professional actor like for you?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I was so incredibly excited. I sat in the makeup chair, I got my makeup done, my first scene was just me in a phone booth calling my grandmother…

Debbie Millman:

Very dramatic.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

The coat, the krishnas…

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, a rock group called The Deep Six, and then I had this giant closeup with a push-in at the end, and I remember when my parents bought a DVR, like a DV… VHS player.

Debbie Millman:

VHS, yeah. VCR, something like that.

Kyra Sedgwick:

VCR, yeah, whatever, and they recorded it, and I was like, “Oh my God, there I am.” And I thought I looked pretty after not thinking I was pretty at all. It was mind-blowing. And it was also weird, but just great. I really felt totally in my element, and it was a very professional, funny situation there. And I would just live for scripts in my mailbox, and oh my God, and look and see how many scenes I had, and oh my God, counting my words, the whole thing.

Debbie Millman:

You studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College, and then you transferred to the University of Southern California, where you graduated with a theater degree, but at that point, you gave yourself a deadline. You gave yourself six years to make it. Why six years? How did that number come about?

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s so funny. I have no idea. And also, first of all, I just want to clarify that I have not graduated from college, and I went to US-

Debbie Millman:

You attended it, then.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I attended, exactly. I attended. But I have no idea except to say that I didn’t want to take my parents’ money. And I knew that at a really young age. I didn’t want to be under anybody’s thumb, and I wanted to make my own way. And so I figured after the soap opera, I think I figured I had enough money for X amount of years, but six sounds like a lot, frankly. But I really did feel, and I really do believe, that if I didn’t start booking things, that I would’ve quit, because I was very aware that it was an artistic endeavor, yes, but that I had to make a living.

Debbie Millman:

In 1983, you auditioned for the movie Flashdance. Is it true that you scolded the director Adrian Lyne for taking a phone call during your audition?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I totally did. I totally did, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

I love that.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I was like, “You’re not going to pick that up, are you?” Because he was reaching for it, and he looked at me and burst out laughing. I had a lot of those kinds of things with men, where I would bust them, and they loved it. I think it was one of the reasons why I got born on the 4th of July with Oliver Stone, was because that, one of the first things he said to me was, “So you went to Brearley, huh? You’re a spoiled private school kid?” And I don’t remember what my retort was, but whatever it was, he just was like, “Oh, okay, this is great. I don’t have to worry about this person. She’s going to bust me right back if I try to bust her. If I say something, she’s not going to shrivel up and die.” And I’m grateful to my stepfather for that kind of prowess.

Debbie Millman:

It’s funny, I find that sort of the more powerful a man is, the more likely they seem to acquiesce to push back. I remember making a creative presentation to the CEO of a major health food company, and while I was making the presentation, he ended up… He was texting or doing something on his phone, and at the end of the presentation, he goes, “Ah, I don’t really understand it.” I said, “Well, I’m not surprised since you really weren’t paying attention.” And that was when I won him over.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh my God, amazing. I love that so much.

Debbie Millman:

Now, I know you worked with Jennifer Beals on Proof. Did you ever tell her about auditioning for the role that she ultimately got?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I think I might have said something, because the other funny thing about that story was that I got a callback, and they asked to do the dancing part. And they asked us to pick a song, and to just do improvisational dancing, but we had to wear a leotard with no tights and heels. And I did not do that. And I remember my agent being like. “That it’s a big mistake if you’re not going to do it.” And I just said, “You know what? I can’t. I can’t with just a leotard.” So I got myself a little mini-skirt and did it that way. But I think I might have told her that, she might have laughed. I didn’t get anywhere close, but I do remember dancing with these ridiculous red heels that I’d gotten, because I didn’t have heels. I didn’t know from heels at that time in my life.

And I had gone to some drag store downtown on Canal Street or something like that, and I remember there was a giant table at the other side of this warehouse size loft where we were supposed to be dancing, and there were just 10 men, one of whom had on mirrored sunglasses. And I can’t remember what the song was, but I just remember thinking, “There’s just no way I’m getting this.” And I definitely did not get that.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s so interesting that they were making you do that kind of dancing when, in fact, there was a dance double for the movie.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Well, she did definitely do some of the dancing, but there was a lot of very muscular kind of break dancing and stuff like that. But I’m sure they didn’t think that at the time. Plus, I know that… I’m certain that Jennifer’s a good dancer in her own right, but maybe at the time, they didn’t think about that.

Debbie Millman:

Your very first movie role was the lead in the 1985 film, War and Love. How did you land a starring role in your first film?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh my God. It was hell. I think I auditioned 30 times for this thing, that nobody ended up seeing, but it felt critical to me at the time, and not only because it was a movie that I wanted to be a lead in the movie, but really because it was about the Holocaust. It was about the children in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, and frankly, I think was just so moved by playing Fidel in Fiddle on the Roof, and that whole Anna Tefka song, and how the Jews were persecuted, and this was another version of that.

I wanted it desperately. I auditioned so many times. Moshé Mizrahi was a very well known and famous Israeli director at the time, but it was great. I was 17, I turned 17 in Budapest where we shot the movie. We shot in Budapest and Hungary, and we actually shot at Auschwitz Birkenau, and it was a harrowing thing to experience as an actor. And I remember that feeling of having been through something, stayed with me for many years after I finished that movie, and I was so young. It’s kind of remarkable that it hit me so hard.

Debbie Millman:

The movie didn’t get particularly good reviews, but the New York Times film critic, Vincent Canby stated that, “Kyra Sedgwick, a pretty blonde actress who looks like a teenage Julie Christie, does surprisingly well.”

Kyra Sedgwick:

I love that so much.

Debbie Millman:

I know, right? I wonder what that really is saying in terms of the pretty part, but in any ca… Obviously you’re gorgeous, but it’s funny how that becomes… Nobody would say that about a man. “He’s a pretty blonde actor,” right?

Kyra Sedgwick:

No, no, no, no, no.

Debbie Millman:

Do reviews matter to you?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh my God, reviews. It’s so funny, because when I hear that review, which I remember my mother quoting young Julie Christie, because that just made her so happy. It was like… Oh, my God.

Debbie Millman:

I can understand that.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Forget it. There’s nothing… That was the best compliment I could have possibly gotten. When reviews are good, they’re not good enough. And when reviews are bad, they’re devastating. So I do everything I can not to read reviews to this day. And Kevin and I have a deal that neither one of us read reviews, so that we don’t know something that the other person doesn’t.

Debbie Millman:

Is it hard to maintain that?

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s hard to maintain it, yeah, sometimes, especially when you look up on your IMDb and something pops up like, “Hey, notification.” But they have a job to do, and they do it well, some of them, but you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. You’re damned if you read them and they’re great, and then you believe it, and then when they don’t love you, it’s horrible. I have a very complicated relationship with it, and yet, I have to say, that if I’m going to go look at a movie, I sometimes look. So I give it credence, but I try not to as an artist.

Debbie Millman:

You met actor, director and musician, Kevin Bacon, for the second time while you were both starring in the 1987 television film, Lemon Sky, and you said you knew right away he was the one. But in all the accounts I’ve read of your courtship, Kevin has always said that you were aloof and standoffish at the beginning, and wouldn’t have dinner with him for weeks.

Kyra Sedgwick:

That’s true.

Debbie Millman:

So you knew, but you also didn’t want to-

Kyra Sedgwick:

I knew pretty quickly, but I did not know right away. I thought he thought he was all that in a bag of chips. That he thought he was really super cool, and-

Debbie Millman:

Well, he kind of is.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Exactly. And I was dating somebody else at the time, and I was like, “Why would I have dinner with you? I’m dating somebody, and plus you don’t really want to have dinner with me anyway. You’re just saying that,” kind of thing. I think I thought of that at the time. But it was very… It really was two weeks of him sort of wooing me, and then when we did have dinner that one night, he walked me home. And the next morning, I literally woke up and I was like, “Oh my God, I had this very warm, safe feeling in my belly, and what is that? Oh, it’s that guy who I just had dinner with.”

And I was like, “That feels like home.” And I was like, “Well, what does that mean?” Because I never really felt like home anywhere was really home. But then I thought, “Oh, I guess it’s him.” Then I went to work, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s definitely him.” So once I actually spent a minute with him, I was like, “Oh, this is it,” because I’d never had anything like that. I think I kept myself very safe in the world of romance and opening my heart, for fear of having it destroyed smartly. But I was aloof in the beginning, because I thought, “What does this guy keep asking me out for dinner for?” I was confused.

Debbie Millman:

I hinted that your meeting on the film wasn’t actually your first meeting, and I was wondering if you can share the story of that actual first meeting.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, so my mother was a big fan of his, and he was about seven years old… He is seven years older than I am, but as we’ve said, I fell in love with acting at 12. And so for my birthday… I mean for Christmas, the year that I turned 12, my mother gave my brother and I theater tickets. And she was a big fan of the theater, she still is, and she had seen Kevin in a few plays, and this latest play that he was in was called Album. It was a very cool little play down at the Cherry Lane Theater about four 20-somethings, and he was one of the stars, and mom thought that my brother and I would love to go see it.

And so she gave us tickets for Christmas, and we went and saw it, and afterwards, we were leaving the theater and we went into a deli to get something, and my brother Nico said, “Oh, Hico, there’s that guy from the play, that guy from the play.” And we thought he was really good. And he goes, “Go up to him and tell him you thought he was good.” And I was like, “No, I don’t want to go up to him. Come on.” He’s like, “Come on, come on. Tell him you thought he was good.”

So I went up to him, and I was like, “Hi, I thought you were really good in the play.” And he was like, “Thanks, sweetheart.” I remember him saying, “Thanks, sweetheart.” And I was like, “Oh,” [inaudible 00:25:46] like a little kid, which of course I was, I didn’t think of myself as a little kid. He was 19, I was 12. Anyway, it was funny. And then years later when I worked with him, I was like, “Do you remember that I came up to you in a deli afterwards?” And he goes, “No, of course I don’t remember.”

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that’s a wonderful story. And I didn’t realize that I was at the Cherry Lane Theater, which is my absolute number one favorite theater in New York.

Kyra Sedgwick:

So great.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that you didn’t ever have any great role models for healthy marriages, but you knew in your heart and soul that Kevin was the right person, and it has been an unquestionable truth in your life. And you’ve been married now for 35 years. You just had your 35th anniversary, happy anniversary.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

In Hollywood years, that’s like 135 years, but what do you attribute to your longevity?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Longevity, that’s what I attribute to longevity. Longevity.

Debbie Millman:

Okay, yep.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, I just think that not getting divorced. I never wanted to get divorced. You never wanted to get divorced. We really like each other. We really like spending time together. We enjoy working together, we enjoy playing together, we enjoy puzzling things out together, we enjoy raising children together, we enjoy walking together down this road of life. And I feel incredibly grateful that I found somebody who can let me grow and change and shift, and doesn’t get threatened by that. We just got lucky. That’s the only thing I can say about how we attribute it. We really got lucky right off the bat.

Debbie Millman:

There were two things that I read that really struck me that I’m going to try to take into my own marriage, which is only three years, so quite a long way to go, but you state that couples should play sexy and fight clean, which is something I think is really true, but then also to always be aware of a WME, and what is a WME for our listeners? And how do you manage the WME?

Kyra Sedgwick:

The worst mood ever is a WME. And mostly I think that if either one of us are in the WME, the greatest thing you can do is just give someone a lot of space to be in the WME, and not try to change it. That’s a good one to remember. It took me many years. And it’s not personal, they’re just in the WME.

Debbie Millman:

Right. You got married when you were 23. You conceived your son Travis on your honeymoon, and when Travis was five and your daughter Sosie was two, you had an epiphany. You realized that your parents had split when you were three, and it became clear that for your children, everything was mom and dad in how they dealt with each other. Did that help you understand your own childhood better?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, I think that was a moment where I went, “Oh boy, I’ve got to do some work. I’ve got some darkness in here, and she needs to come out and be talked about, and looked at, and examined, because she’s in here running the show, and I don’t even know it.” What I realized was that parents are incredibly important. And I could see in my kids that we were their everything. We were their everything.

And if there were to be some cataclysmic shift that happened where we would split, it would rip their world in two. And I think that that kind of honor and respect for a really traumatic thing that happened in my childhood had not… We had not been taught that that was something that would affect us later on in life. I think that both of my parents, probably out of their own sense of needing to be okay, I completely understand it, for their own sense of not being terrible parents, would tell us that everything was fine. Yes, we split up, but mommy and daddy still love each other, and mommy and daddy will always love you, and it’s not going to affect you later on in life.

I don’t think that there was any kind of emotional space held for, “This must be really hard for you.” Ever, ever, ever, ever. And that’s something that would never happen today, at least with on top of it parents. We’ve learned how important it’s to hold a space for all the feelings. But at the time, I think that for their own preservation, and I know for my mother’s, she really needed us to be okay. And when I say us, I mean me and my two brothers. So we acted like it was okay.

In fact, one of the amazing things that happened between Kevin and I when we first met was on one of our dinners, first or second or third dinner, he said to me, “Tell me about your childhood,” or something like that. And I said, “My dad left when I was three, and my parents got divorced a couple of years later.” And he was like, “Oh, wow, how was that?” And I said, “Oh, it was fine. They handled it really well, so we were completely fine. It didn’t affect us.” And he laughed and went, “Well, I guess you can keep thinking that for a couple of more years.” And I remember looking at him like, “What? What are you talking about?” But it wasn’t until many years later that I was like, “Oh.” And I remembered him saying that, and I think that it was just a story I told myself. It’s like that great movie that incredible Sarah Polly did called-

Debbie Millman:

Women Talking?

Kyra Sedgwick:

No, called Stories We Tell.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, that’s [inaudible 00:31:40].

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s like the stories we tell ourselves, and then suddenly you’re like, “Why am I telling myself a story that at three, when my dad left my mother and she almost had a nervous breakdown, I was fine? And when they finally got divorced, that was fine?” It wasn’t fine. I’m sure it was… I know it was horrible. I don’t remember it that much, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect me. So I think that those are the kind of things that come right up in your face when you have children, in a way that you could probably skate by on your subconscious level forever, and be perfectly fine about it, and then suddenly when you have kids, you’re like, “You have to look at this thing.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting, because you did all of that work to understand it better for yourself. I’m wondering if there’s any correlation to right after you had kids, a lot of the roles that you were getting became significantly more prominent. You were nominated for a Golden Globe for your part in Miss rose White in 1992, another in ’95 for the film Something To Talk About, where you played Julia Robert’s sassy sister, so I’m wondering if getting that more clear in your own mind facilitated a better sort of understanding of your talent.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I think there’s no question at all that the more inside job work we can do, we’ll be better for everything in our lives. Ourselves, the ripple effect with family is undeniable, and learning about yourself as a human, and accepting all the parts of yourself can definitely help your acting. And absolutely, people see it. And then they want you to portray someone in that point in their life. And drama, conflict, tension is at the core of comedy, drama, everything at movies place, everything.

Debbie Millman:

I have one sort of trivia question for you about Something To Talk About. My wife and I watched it the other night again. It’s one of her favorite films.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh, that’s so nice.

Debbie Millman:

And she actually has a question for you. Emma Rae King, what did she do for a living? Because she didn’t work for the horse farm.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh, I think… I felt like she did a lot of accounting for her dad, and did the hiring and firing, actually. I thought she was the one that would tell people the bad news when they were getting fired. Because at one point he’s like, “You’re going to deal with telling your sister that the shit’s hitting the fan with her husband, right? You’re going to do that for me, because I can’t do it.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, we were taking bets on, maybe she was the lawyer or the financier, we were really flummoxed about it. In any case, you got your first producer credit in 1996 for the beautiful movie Losing Chase. You also starred in the movie with Helen Mirren and Beau Bridges, and you said that you’re a good producer because you’re bossy and opinionated. And while you don’t always think you’re right, you think you have good ideas and love giving people jobs. And so given your nature, what was it like being directed in that film by your husband? Because that was his directorial debut.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Right. Well, it was funny, because I got that script and knew I wanted to produce it. And at that time, what producing meant for me was getting financing, which came really easily, because Showtime, for whatever reason at that time, was making movies and wanted to make a movie with me, and hiring other people. Hiring the pop sort of group.

And when Kevin read the script and he liked it, I was faced with a very difficult decision, because I knew that if I were to give him this job, it would be Kevin Bacon’s first directing job, and not Kyra Sedgwick’s first producing job. And that is the way it is still considered to this day. I knew I was making a sacrifice. Having said that, the material really spoke to him. He’d spent a lot of time in Martha’s Vineyard, he knew what I was going for, and I thought it could help the movie to have him as the director. So it was one of those moments where it was like, “Oh, yay, I get you to have my first producorial gig, but it’s going to look like something else for people.”

Debbie Millman:

So people think that the director… People that aren’t in the movies think the director’s the boss.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Right.

Debbie Millman:

So what was it like being the boss, but then being directed by your husband?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah. Well, I think that that answer gives you the sense of what I was grappling with. Because as we’ve established, we live in a patriarchy still, and also we live in a world where people love movie stars. And so he was definitely the one that everybody felt was the leader of this whole thing, that maybe possibly I’d gotten some credit just for fun. As a producer, at that time, I was much more of a just creative producer, where I was like, “Okay, I got the script, I’m going to hire the director, I’m going to take it to someplace and have them do it.” So that was sort of the beginning and the end of my job as a producer, until it came to editing, I went back in there. But I really had to, as an actor, let go of that hat while we were shooting.

Debbie Millman:

2005 was a big year for the Sedgwick Bacon family. You were all involved in the film Loverboy, another film that Kevin directed and starred in, along with you and your two children. Loverboy was a very, very… Or is a very dark movie, with a totally unexpected ending. Crazy unexpected, at least to me. How do you incorporate playing someone so evil in your own psyche?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, it’s funny. I never thought of her as evil. I thought of her-

Debbie Millman:

Creating so much harm.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah. No, I know. It’s-

Debbie Millman:

Evil is not the right word.

Kyra Sedgwick:

No, no. Listen, she tries to commit a double suicide with her seven-year-old son. I would call that a version of evil. But I knew in order to play her, I couldn’t really feel that way about her. What I felt about her was that she didn’t get enough as a child. She had parents that were narcissistically in love with each other. They were everything to each other, and the child was like an afterthought, always. And they were never letting that child into their partnership. And so she has this child to have something of her own.

And I have to find some way into the character where I find some nugget of connection. And my connection with that character was having had two children of my own, there always comes that moment, that first moment when your child lets go of your hand. And it happens either on the first day of kindergarten or the first day of daycare, or sometimes it doesn’t happen until much later for some people, but there’s always some time in which your kid is walking away from you and growing up on some level, and they will never, ever need you in the same way as they do when they’re infants and toddlers.

And that is something that is very difficult for some people to get over. It was impossible for this mother to get over, but I can tell you that I have… I feel like the tragedy of motherhood is that it is a slow moving letting go that happens all the time at every year, at every level of their development. And it’s the only job that if you do it exceedingly well, you get fired. And that, to me, is heartbreaking. And I could really relate to the mom in the movie because of that.

Debbie Millman:

2005 also brought you one of the roles you’re now most known for, playing the great, complicated, beautiful, brilliant Brenda Leigh Johnson on the television show, the Closer, for seven seasons. Now, I initially read that you wanted to turn that part down, but it was Kevin who urged you to take it. Why were you so unsure about taking the part?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I wouldn’t even read it for a bunch of months. My manager at the time was like, “You have to read it. It’s great.” And I was like-

Debbie Millman:

It’s you. It was meant for you. No one else could have played that part. No one.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Well, I knew it shot in LA. That was a deal right there for me, for months. And then Kevin said to me, “I really think you should read it.” And then when I read it and I fell in love with it, he was like, “I really think you should do it.” And we knew,, on some deep level that the kids were not going to move to LA. And I don’t really know even how we knew that, but I think Travis and Sosie were just such… We had just made this choice early on in their life to raise them in New York, and that felt very important. And then it became important to them.

So it was a hard choice to make because of the kids. And I think that what Kevin was saying was like, “Look, there’s been a lot of things you’ve turned down because it wasn’t the right time for the kids, and I think it’s time you stop doing that. And this is a great role, and so I will not work when you’re shooting.” And in the beginning it was four and a half months, and they would come out every other weekend, and Sosie was 12, which is still really young. Travis was 16, and a very old 16, really. And I don’t look back with regret at all about taking it, and I missed stuff. No question that I missed stuff.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you won nearly every award you could for playing Brenda Leigh Johnson. An Emmy, A Golden Globe, a Satellite Award, a People’s Choice Award, the cast was nominated for a Screen Actor’s Guild Award every year you were on the air, you were also awarded a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television. For most of the run, the show was cable television’s highest rated drama. People loved your character so much, they wanted to look like her. Fashion blogs filled up with detailed examinations of the vintage jackets and your floral skirts. It was so much fun reading through all of this. And for many years after this show ended, there was a company making replicas of the purse that you carried, the one that you shot the gun through the purse in the last episode. What do you think it was about Brenda Leigh Johnson that resonated so deeply with people?

Kyra Sedgwick:

She was such a surprising character. She was just a bundle of contradictions. She was wildly underestimated in a way that I think that people just love. She seemed like this pretty blonde to go full circle, who didn’t have a brain in her head, who spoke with a lilting southern draw, and wore nothing but skirts and heels and sweater sets, and was the smartest badass in the room, who could elicit confessions, which are the only airtight way to send a criminal to jail. And she did it every episode, [inaudible 00:43:23] a few, and she did it with a lot of panache and a hell of a lot of style. And she was funny, she was flawed deeply, she was morally ambiguous, and she was a compulsive eater. And-

Debbie Millman:

Ring Dings. I love that they were Ring Dings.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, exactly. And was utterly accessible. I loved her. She mattered to me. She mattered to a lot of women. I know a lot of women that have gone into that business, into some kind of criminal investigatory business, because of it. And she was incredibly important because she made people a lot of money, which in this business, is the key to longevity. And that felt really good. And she paved the way for, I think, a lot of women being in starring roles from that moment on, because they saw that it paid.

Debbie Millman:

Well, one of the interesting things I think about Brenda Leigh Johnson was the fact that she was all of those great things and flawed. And you saw those flaws, and it somehow felt comforting that here was this sort of brilliant, strong woman who also did sometimes have questionable ethics. But I think you knew deep, deep down through and through, she was a morally noble person.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, exactly. I remember the first episode, that chocolate thing, we’re rewarding herself with the Ring Ding at the end, or Ding Dong, West Coast, East Coast-

Debbie Millman:

Exactly.

Kyra Sedgwick:

It’s a battle to the finish.

Debbie Millman:

As long as the tin foils around it.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yes, exactly. And I remember saying to James, “Well, you’re going to keep that, right? You’re going to keep it in the subsequent episodes?” And he was like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” I was like, “Oh no, you have to. You have to keep it.”

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You lay on the bed and go, “Mm.”

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh yeah, forget it.

Debbie Millman:

What’s better than that?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Nothing.

Debbie Millman:

After seven seasons as the top-rated most awarded show on television, you made the decision to leave. You decided to retire from the show. Why?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I really didn’t want to become one of those number one on the call sheets who is really kind of bitter and sour and icky, and not treating people well, and not grateful, and that was a big part of it, honestly. And I had never been that person. It was a joy from top to bottom, and it was all consuming, but I didn’t want it to turn. I also didn’t want to hang around too long in that role, and then only be known for that role. That was the biggest reason, really, was because I’m an artist who needs to be fed in different places.

But it was a hard decision, because I knew how deeply it would affect so many people, all the crew. We had no defectors. People came back every year to do the show, and it was only 15 episodes. And all our crew came back every single year. So I knew that it meant a lot, breaking up the family, but I knew it was the right thing for me to do as an artist. And ultimately, I don’t want to hang around too long and then have the audience start to turn on us. That was just too heartbreaking to imagine.

Debbie Millman:

In the 10 years since you left the show, you’ve continued acting on both episodic television and in films, you’ve continued producing, but you’ve also taken up an entirely new role, directing. After working on set for so many years in front of the camera, what motivated you to get behind the lens?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Well, I think there were a couple of things. I think that I had reached critical mass in seeing work that I had done as an actor not cut well, not shot well, not written well, I think I had gotten to the point where I was like, “Why is my best stuff on the cutting room floor? Why did they edit it that way? Why do I not have any coverage in this scene?” Honestly. And I think I just got to the point where I was like, “Well, if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” When you look back on my career, I had worked with so many great directors for so many years, like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then I think that kind of fell away, it felt like. And so I was, I think, becoming increasingly frustrated with what was coming to me, and also what ended up on screen.

And Kevin actually, again, featured prominently in… My eye for the way something is directed, became more and more keen. And he would always say, “I don’t know why you’re not directing. You have such a… You think of things directoraly, you see things you directoraly, you always, when we leave a movie, talk for a long time about the way things were shot and the arc of the character, but also arc of things visually, and you should think about it.” And I was like, “No, no, no, I’ll never direct.” And I used to say, “I’ll never direct. I’ll never direct.” And I think that honestly, a big part of that was because I thought I would never be great at it, as if one has to be great right off… out of the gate.

But I think that ultimately what happened was, I had this script that I had been trying to produce for 10 years called Story of a Girl, it was a book that I had optioned with my friend, I was meeting at Lifetime with Tanya Lopez to talk about producing stuff for them, and I was sitting outside in the waiting room, and there was a little video that they had done about female directors. And I watched the video, wasn’t thinking much of it, but then when I went into speak to her, she said, “Hey, listen, if there’s something that you are interested, we’re doing this mandate here where we’re only hiring female directors for a certain amount of time, and if you have a passion project, and…”

I just blurted out, “I have Story of a Girl and I want to direct it,” and kind of turned around and was like, “Who the hell just said that?” And realized, that was me. And she read it that night and said, “I want to do this with you and I’ll give you a little money,” and that’s how that came about. But I think that it was one of those things where my soul was kind of ahead of my brain at that moment, but it was daunting and scary and wonderful and turned out really well.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah. You said this about directing actors, “I think that every actor is ripping themselves open and leaving a piece of their soul on the floor for you, so you better honor what that is. I feel like I know that intrinsically. That’s not something I had to learn. That’s something I deeply understand.” Kyra, how do you best create a space for an actor to sort of rip themselves open like that?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Well, I think that simply by virtue of the fact that they know that I know how it feels to be so vulnerable, and to have this giant piece of machinery, this camera, between you and the other actor, all you’re trying to do is tell the truth, and you have to do it between action and cut, I think that they understand intrinsically that that’s something that I understand. Having said that, I just try to be incredibly kind and loving and celebratory, and create a really safe place for them, so that they can fly without a net and give them whatever they need to get there. Every actor needs something different, but I think that you learn their instrument, and then do what you can to try to help them play. And I help them try to play their interest instrument the best that they can.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk with you now about your most current project, your first narrative film project, a theatrical movie titled Space Oddity. Your production company, Big Swing, acquired the rights to the story, which in many ways, is a love letter to the planet, but it’s also an intimate portrait of family connections and disconnections and hope and sadness and grief and new love. What drew you to this project?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Well, all those things you just mentioned. I’m like, “Sign me up. I want to watch that movie, I want to live in that movie.” There were so many themes that were in the script, and that we spent a lot of time cultivating with the writer that were just of primary importance to me as a human and as an artist. I think that storytelling can change you, I think that storytelling can help you to exercise your compassion in such a beautiful way, and only humans get to do that, although there are some mammals that feel compassion as well, but learning about ourselves through art, whatever that art form is, is just a critical part of living for me.

And so all of those themes feel critically important to me, and more important as I get older. That idea of there’s no place that you can go that you’re not going to be hurt, that people aren’t going to die, that there aren’t going to be struggles, and the way through it is with connection with others, and there’s no other option. And being present means you’re going to get hurt, but it’s worth it.

And the journey of it, the movie was so entertaining, I found it, on the page. I was flying through the script just thinking, “I love these characters. I don’t understand them necessarily, but I want to stick with it until the end.” The payoff felt so beautiful. I love the book ending of the movie of like, “I’m going to go to Mars.” “No, I’m going to stay on Earth.” And then everything in between is, how do you be that person who wants to check out in the ultimate sense because things are just too hard, and then you become that person who goes, “No, I am fully immersed and planting myself in the soil.” I just love that journey.

Debbie Millman:

I do too. I also was so impressed with the way in which the decision making was shown. So many times in a movie where there’s this sort of cataclysmic moment, or this cinematic climactic moment of awareness, it sort of pops up. And here you sort of see the process of struggling through it. And that’s one of the things that I enjoyed the most about it, was really feeling like I understood the inner dialogue of this journey, without it being a surprise to discover. You felt like you were going along in that decision making. I love the movie. It’s a beautiful movie. You said it was really hard to raise the money for this film. Why?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I don’t know. I don’t know. I think there’s no question, I’m a female director, and even though I was nominated for a DGA award with Story of a Girl, it’s not like it made a lot of money for people. It was a respected movie on Lifetime, which is not going to win you a lot of financial support for your next gig. I think it’s a sweet movie, which I think that in the world where it’s just so hard to get people to go to a movie often, they want it to be possibly about a true story, or a horror movie, or something that you look at it and go, “I know what that’s going to be.”

And I think this movie demands more of you than that. And I do think that there’s something weird about sweet tales, even though I feel like what we need so much is sweetness in the world right now. Not saccharin, we’re going to take you on a ride, and we’re going to give you some pain, because there’s definitely some pain in this movie, but ultimately, it’s going to be hopeful, and you’re going to feel good about life afterwards. I think that’s something that we’re having trouble selling, even though I think it’s what people crave.

And I also think that what I heard a lot is it’s execution dependent, which means, “We don’t know if you can do it. We don’t know if you can cast it. We don’t know if you can do it.” And I find that so shocking, because I think everything is execution dependent, but I think it means something else in Hollywood that I didn’t know at the time. But we have 15 executive producers, and we made the movie. And I trust that it will find its people. You know what I mean?

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Which is the good thing about, yeah, it was only in the theater for a week because that was the only… That was the deal. It was only going to be that. But the fact that it’s going to have a long life on streaming, and that feels good about what’s happening in the world right now in movies, but even though it’s kind of painful that we’re not all together having an experience in the movie theater.

Debbie Millman:

Well, in this particular movie, I think it’s a very intimate movie. I don’t necessarily want to be listening to somebody eating their popcorn next to me while I’m sort of feeling the feelings.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Good. I’m glad.

Debbie Millman:

But you’re the third female director I’ve interviewed this season. Sian Heder, who directed CODA, Sarah Polly, who directed Women Talking, and it’s so incredibly disheartening to hear the same thing over and over about women directors in this business. And I really hope that that changes a lot sooner than it’s changing.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Me too.

Debbie Millman:

Because these movies matter. Much of the movie is set on a flower farm. How did you find this flower farm? Where can we go see this flower farm in real life?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, this flower farm exists. It is a working flower farm in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. I think that’s it. I might be wrong, but I know the town of Wickford is where we shot the movie, and they were close by Wickford, and it’s called Robin Hollow Farm, and it is a family owned farm, husband and wife, Mike Hutchison and Polly, and it is a stunning flower farm. And I was in Los Angeles in February of 2021, and I was desperate to find a flower farm, I knew I wanted to shoot in Wickford, Rhode Island because I love the town, it was perfect, and I needed to find a flower farm. And I went online and I looked up a bunch of flower farms in Rhode Island, and this one really stood out at me in every way. And I called them, I cold called the farm on the day before Valentine’s Day, and I called and-

Debbie Millman:

Busiest day of the year.

Kyra Sedgwick:

I know. And Polly picked up the phone and I immediately launched into, “Hi, I’m Kyra Sedgwick and I’ve got this movie that I want to shoot this summer in Rhode Island, and I saw your flower farm online and it’s so beautiful, and might you consider letting me shoot there?” And she said, she took a pause, and she goes, “Well, I’m going to have my husband call you back, because he’s a little more knowledgeable about the film world than I am, but I did want to remind you that you are calling a flower farm the day before Valentine’s Day.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I hate Valentine’s Day. I mean, I love Valentine’s Day. I mean, I just need [inaudible 00:59:02].”

And it was like I was talking to some rockstar. But yeah, we met with them that spring, and they went for it. They let us shoot there in the summer of 20… I guess it was summer of 2021. And it was absolutely incredible. Or maybe it was ’22. Sorry, I don’t remember my dates exactly. But in any case, that’s how I found the flower farm, literally online. And then I just got lucky.

Debbie Millman:

The casting is also really wonderful. I read that Kyle Allen, the young man who stars in the movie, came on board at the last minute, that somebody else had dropped out. Is he by any chance related to David Duchovny? He looks like an exact replica of Fox Mulder in the early X-Files days.

Kyra Sedgwick:

That’s so funny. People say he looks like him, they say he looks like Heath Ledger, which I also really see, and Mark Wahlberg, who I also see.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, yeah.

Kyra Sedgwick:

But no, he is not related, as far as I know, to any of the above. He is his own creation, and he is a classically trained ballet dancer. And I think that was a real plus for me, because I know how hard it is to be a classically trained ballet dancer. And so this guy was going to know how to work hard. Aside from being a wonderful actor, with a lot of tenderness and soul and pain in his eyes, I knew he would know how to work really hard.

Debbie Millman:

And the chemistry between him and Alexandra Shipp, the young female star in the movie, is just palpable.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

Really wonderful casting.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Yeah, I got lucky.

Debbie Millman:

And I read that though your husband is in it, he was not your first choice.

Kyra Sedgwick:

That is right. That is correct, yes.

Debbie Millman:

How do you feel about that?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I offered it to somebody else… Fine. When I asked him, he said, “I was wondering what took you so long.” I didn’t want to ask him to be in the movie because I didn’t want him to think that… He was in Story of a Girl, and I didn’t want him to feel like, “Boy, she can’t get a movie off the ground unless she puts me in it.” And honestly, that was the reason

Debbie Millman:

Your husband has stated that he’s never seen you happier at work than when you’re behind the camera. And you’ve stated that this part of your artistic journey as a director feels much more like a calling than your acting. And I think that’s just a wonderful thing to be able to discover in an artistic life. What advice would you give someone steeped in any career about making a significant pivot?

Kyra Sedgwick:

My mom was a really great role model in that way. She worked with kids with learning disabilities from the time I was little, until she was about 50, and then she studied and became a family therapist. She was a really great role model in going, “It never stops. You can keep learning, and you can keep trying new things.” So I would say keep trying new things. And sometimes it’s not that you are feeling old, it’s that you are bored.

And I’ve always had a love for learning, and while this is very much adjacent to what I do as an actor, it’s a bigger piece of the pie. And I think that in a way, as a woman, I was told, “You’re only supposed to have this little piece.” And I think that growing up in the business, I didn’t see a lot of female directors, so if you can’t see it, you really can’t dream it. And so I think that was part of it, but I think that it’s never too late to start something new, especially if you do the footwork to get you there.

Debbie Millman:

Is there anything you’d like to tackle that you haven’t yet?

Kyra Sedgwick:

I’d love to do a big action movie. I’ve done some action on City on a Hill, which was a show that I did for Showtime, and Ray Donovan, I did some action in that one. I’d love to do more of it. Again, I feel like it’s something that women aren’t invited to that party, and so I want to crash it.

Gina Prince Bythewood is just an idol of mine in that way. She just does action so well. And as an extension of great character, I think it can be something really wonderful. And I really want to lean more into big ballsy comedies. I love comedy, and I think I grew up on some of the greatest comedy of Mel Brooks and Bugs Bunny and Albert Brooks and Catherine O’Hara and all these incredible people, and I’ve got a real ear for it, so I want to do more of that as well.

Debbie Millman:

Well, speaking of action movies, this is my last question. You and Kevin both have parts in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special. In the film, Kevin is essentially abducted from his home, and I recently saw a video of you zooming in from your home on a late night talk show, and the house you were calling from looked suspiciously similar. Is it possible that your home was featured in the Guardians of the Galaxy special?

Kyra Sedgwick:

Oh my God, hell no. I have been in this business… Both of us have been in this business way too long to even consider letting anyone shoot here. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all.

Debbie Millman:

It seems like they designed something that was rather similar in terms of the windows. I don’t know, maybe I’m making it up.

Kyra Sedgwick:

That’s so funny. Yeah, maybe because it looked a little modern or something like that.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it.

Kyra Sedgwick:

But that was a billion-dollar house, and our homes are decidedly not that.

Debbie Millman:

Well, I love that you were both in that, in the Zoom.

Kyra Sedgwick:

It was fun. And I love that I can say on IMDb that I’m in the Marvel universe, so that’s pretty exciting.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Kyra Sedgwick, thank you so much for Thank you making so much work that matters. And thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters.

Kyra Sedgwick:

Thanks. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Debbie Millman:

Kyra Sedgwick’s latest film is Space Oddity, and it is out now. And it is wonderful. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Kyra Sedgwick appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

If you’re looking for something great to watch, just look for something Sian Heder has worked on, and you won’t go wrong. She’s written and directed two films, Tallulah, and more recently, CODA, which not only earned her an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, the film was also awarded the 2022 Oscar for Best Picture.

She’s won a Peabody Award for her work on the television show, Men of a Certain Age, and worked on three seasons of Orange is the New Black. Her most recent effort is as the showrunner and executive producer of the Apple TV show, Little America, which just started its second incredible season. Sian Heder, welcome to Design Matters.

Sian Heder:

I’m so happy to be here talking to you.

Debbie Millman:

Sean. I was wondering if you could tell our listeners about the very special way you celebrated at your sixth birthday party.

Sian Heder:

It’s so funny. I was like, “You’ve done your research, Debbie.” I used to throw these birthday parties … I think I was a little older than six, but I would throw these birthday parties where I would basically write a full screenplay, almost.

I would write character descriptions for all the guests that were coming to my party, and everyone had to come in character, and I would get murdered at some point in the party, and I would go upstairs, and put on a bald cap and glasses, and come back as the detective, and interrogate all my guests, and solve my own murder at the party. And it was weeks of preparation.

I mean, I was probably more dedicated and focused about that, my birthday parties, than I’d ever been about anything, before and since. But it’s so funny, looking back, because both of my parents were artists, I came from a very artistic family, but I think I came to directing later.

Not later, I was in my twenties, but it was, I wanted to be an actor, and I was really pursuing that. And when you look back and you go, “Well, I was clearly a director from the moment I was able to plan a birthday party,” because that was where I chose to put my energy, was into these massive productions, and organizing and running the show. And I still have friends who joke and talk about that time.

Actually, for my fortieth birthday party, some writer friends of mine and my sister dug up an old script that I think was from my 10-year-old party, and they recreated the whole thing for my fortieth birthday party. So everyone was in character as these characters that I’d written when I was 10 years old, and they came, and reenacted the whole thing, and it was totally amazing.

Debbie Millman:

That sounds wonderful. I can’t help but think, since I’ve read about this, it’s out there that someone else read about this, when you first put it out there, and stole the idea for Glass Onion. Just saying.

Sian Heder:

I mean, it’s possible. I do think, the murder mystery part, I actually probably think the idea for it had come from the fact that my parents probably attended some kind of murder mystery party, and I was like, “Oh I’m on this. This should be my thing.”

But the interrogating the guests part, there’s all these pictures of me truly wearing a bald cap, and being this very serious detective, and no one could break character. And yeah, I was a pretty bossy kid. I’m surprised that my friends put up with me.

Debbie Millman:

Well, you were born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you just mentioned your parents. Your dad escaped from Hungary as a refugee during the war, and came to the United States with nothing. Your mom is from Wales. How did they first meet?

Sian Heder:

They met on Friday the 13th, which I’ve always held as a lucky day, because my parents met on that day. They met at a gallery opening. My mom is an artist. She came to go to graduate school for art. And my father, yes, was a refugee who escaped during the Hungarian Revolution.

My dad was living in Cambridge, or in Boston, I think, at the time. My mom was teaching art at RISD, and they met at a gallery opening. And my mom came up to my dad, and told him a dirty joke that was going around the party, and they met and fell in love. And it was always this amazing intersection of two very different cultures, I think, my Welsh family and my Hungarian family.

Being a first generation kid, I mean, obviously, Little America, and my interest in that show and work on that show is very much driven by understanding all of the different immigrant experiences that exist, coming to this country, and how varied and specific and intimate those stories are. But yes, I had a wacky hippie artist upbringing, where we had a hammock in every room in my house.

Debbie Millman:

That was cool.

Sian Heder:

As one does.

Debbie Millman:

As one does.

Sian Heder:

When I got older, I was like, “You guys don’t have a hammock in your living room? What’s wrong with you? Aren’t there hammocks everywhere?”

But yeah. No, and I grew up in Cambridge, which was an amazing place to grow up in, too. I think, as a city, it was a really progressive, exciting, cool childhood.

Debbie Millman:

Your parents have worked collaboratively to create major public art installations all over the United States. They’ve been doing that for well over 30 years. They’ve been married for 50.

You said that they’re an intense couple who fight like crazy, but are still madly in love. I’m wondering if you could share what you attribute to their longevity together.

Sian Heder:

I was actually just thinking about this question, because I was trying to articulate what I think makes a lasting marriage to somebody. My husband and I have been together for 18 years, which is not 50, but it feels long.

My parents have, and always have had, a very similar sense of adventure. And what excites them about living, and being alive, and what adventure means to them, what’s fulfilling. I think I was saying this, actually, to my husband the other day, because I was talking about, we never thought before we got married to get together and talk about our value systems.

It was, “I’m in love with you, you’re in love with me.” But I really do think lasting relationships feel like they are based on shared value systems of what brings happiness, or what it brings fulfillment. And I think my parents were both very adventurous people who love to travel, in a hardcore way, where I remember being a kid, and traipsing around Mexico, and finding random places to stay.

We never had organized trips, we never had. It was always renting a car, and then realizing that car had no brakes, and breaking down in some village, and finding a place to stay. That was a real sense of adventure and travel, but then, also, a commitment to creativity, and making things, and wanting to explore the world, and use experiences to make art, use your experience of a place, or experience of a culture.

I think what my mom does as a public artist has very much infiltrated the way that I work. Because a lot of her work is very site specific, and it’s finding a place, investigating the place and researching it, and digging up history, and finding interesting, embedded connections, and then, building a piece that almost makes the place more about itself. That kind of deep dive, or research, or way of falling down the rabbit hole of a story, and uncovering what it’s about is very much the way that I work. So it’s interesting to look back and think about, but it was always a part of my life.

My mom’s studio was a very alive space for me, and so much of my childhood was spent as she was working in her studio, and I was in a corner, messing around with clay, or whatever materials she wasn’t using at that point. And I always understood that her art was as important as me.

And I don’t mean that in any way of being, she loved her art more than me. I knew she loved me more than anything, but that art was a part of life. And that’s what you do is, you make things, and you figure out what you have to say, and you put it out there in the world.

That’s not diminishing to your relationships or your family. That’s something that actually helps your family thrive, and they can participate in. And I feel like I’m trying to give that to my kids, too.

Debbie Millman:

I know your parents forbade you from watching television when you were a kid.

Sian Heder:

This is true.

Debbie Millman:

Where and how did you develop your sense of storytelling? Was it from books, or just …

Sian Heder:

Books.

Debbie Millman:

Sort of born with it?

Sian Heder:

It was all books, and I was an absolutely obsessive reader, and my daughter is too. My daughter just turned nine two weeks ago, but she is never without a book. I mean, I’ve become the father in Matilda.

I don’t know if you know that story, but I’m literally, like, “Put the book so away. Why can’t you watch telly a normal child?”

Being, it’s just an escape for her. I’m like, “Go brush your teeth.” And I turn around, and she’s standing in the middle of the living room with a book in her face. But I recognize that feeling that I see in her, because I was like that.

Books were such a complete world to me. Yes, an escape, but also, so exciting and fulfilling. I have a friend now who was friends with me, when I was six or seven, and she was joking recently with me of, she’s like, “I remember calling you up to hang out for a play date.”

And I said, “I can’t.” She said, “Why not?” And I said, “I’m reading.” And she was, “Why is reading … Who uses reading as an excuse to not meet up and hang out?” But that’s how it felt to me. And I wasn’t allowed to watch TV.

My parents ended up getting a television because they couldn’t get a babysitter. Everyone refused to babysit for us, because they were like, “I’m not going to your house. I can’t watch TV.”

They finally did get a TV that I think my mom found in someone’s trash. She fully trash picked somebody, and got their old TV, and then it just sat at the bottom of our stairs, on the floor, and there was no chair to watch it.

Basically, the TV was plugged in at the bottom of the stairs, and you kind of sat on the floor in front of the stairs, if you wanted to watch YV. I was like, “What a funny thing.”

I think I was allowed to watch two hours of TV a week, finally. I had to choose very wisely, because it was so limited.

Debbie Millman:

What did you choose?

Sian Heder:

I think it was The Cosby Show and Family Ties. It was an hour. Oh, I think an hour was Dallas, actually, for a while.

Then, I was like, “Oh, if I can keep my parents engaged for long enough, they’ll get hooked on Falcon Crest, and then I can stay up another hour, and watch Falcon Crest.”

I can’t believe that I used an hour of my two hours on Dallas, but I do think that that was it for awhile. And I grew up in a four-family house, so it was a row house in Cambridge, with a shared backyard.

There were kids that lived next door, who were my friends, and I would sneak over to their house, and I would watch TV in their basement. I remember being 30, and I was over at their house and their mom, Jodi, was like, “Sian, do your parents know that you’re here?”

I’m like, “Jodi, I’m 30 years old. It’s okay that I’m at your house. I’m not sneaking TV.” But it was like, my mom would come over and bust me watching TV. Now, my parents watch a lot of TV, which I feel is hilarious, that now, they’ve fully embraced it.

Debbie Millman:

Well, they have to. They have to be watching Little America.

Sian Heder:

Exactly, exactly. But I think, no, I loved movies, and I loved stories, and I did love television, I think, but my entree to storytelling was through books.

Now it’s like, I don’t see a lot of difference, even between TV and movies. It’s all storytelling to me. And it’s like, you find the medium to best tell your story, and then that’s where you do it.

Debbie Millman:

You went to Carnegie Mellon, and studied film and acting, and while you were there, I understand people told you that you should be directing, because you had such an eye for performance and for people. What was so interesting to you about acting at that point?

Sian Heder:

I loved the theater experience of coming together with a group of people, having this very intense rehearsal process, and performance, and the connection between live audience and an immediate response, which I think, I still now, working in film, I’m always trying to recreate. How do you keep the audience in mind? How do you know how things are going to land?

Because I loved that in theater, that there was this immediate dialogue between the audience and the performers. I just loved it. So I was a total theater kid, and I went to Carnegie Mellon to study acting, and loved Shakespeare, and classical theater, and really wanted to do that.

It’s funny. Carnegie Mellon was a really intense place, and I don’t know if it still exists, but it was like, there was a cut system. I don’t remember how many kids started, but you knew that half your class would be cut by the end of the four years. It was very competitive and intense, and we would have these conferences at the end of every semester.

And there was always so much tension and anxiety around these conferences, because you thought, “Am I doing well enough to stay in the program?” And I remember, I had a teacher who said to me, “I really think you might be a director.” I was heartbroken, because I thought, “Oh, does this mean he doesn’t think I’m an actor?” And I don’t think he meant it that way.

I think he was watching me in class, giving notes on people’s scenes, and watching people perform, in the way that I watched my classmates, and responded to my classmates. I do think, in a way, even as an actor, I was always a little bit outside of myself, kind of watching the big picture, or wanting to be telling the story, as opposed to just participating in and living the story.

So it did feel like a very natural move for me, when I first started directing. I thought, “Oh, this is a better fit for me,” that you get to be a part of telling the whole story.

Debbie Millman:

After you graduated, you moved to Manhattan and began to act in television shows, including The Sopranos, Law and Order SVU, which is one of my favorites.

I think I’ve seen every episode, including yours, about three times. What was the auditioning process like for you when you first started acting?

Sian Heder:

Auditioning is horrible. It’s just horrible. I think, because, what I loved about acting was being able to step into another person’s life or experience. It’s the same part of me that gets fulfilled by being a writer and director.

When I’m writing. I feel, “Oh, what a way to just, we only get this one life to live.” In a way, the scope of that life is always going to be limited by who you are, or how you grew up, or what your surroundings are.

So the idea that you could get to have all of these different experiences, you could step into being Hedda Gabler, and then you could step into being Lady Macbeth, and get to feel what that feels like, to have done all these things, or had all these experiences.

So I think, in a way, Carnegie Mellon was really like, “You can be anything, you can play anything.” And you pushed yourself in every direction, and you went through voice and speech, and you could do every accent.

Then you get out in the world, and you go to these auditions to play a 22-year-old girl on blah, blah, blah. And it was almost like, I didn’t know how to be myself.

I’d learned all these skills, and I was like, “Oh, I think now they want me to be me, but I almost haven’t been trained to do that. Or that’s been trained out of me, somehow.”

That’s what people respond to, especially on film, is people that just feel authentically themselves, in a way, unless you’re Daniel Day-Lewis, and then you get to be the person who disappears into roles.

But a lot of the time, when you’re starting out, it’s really the essence of you that the world is responding to. I think, when you’ve gone to drama school, and you’ve filled yourself with all these ideas of, “But I’m so malleable, and I can be all these things,” and it’s like, “But what is actually the thing that I have to offer?”

It was hard to be a young woman, and suddenly faced with what that game was, of how you succeed as an actor when you’re a young woman. I recently saw the film Brainwashed, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s a documentary by Nina Menkes about, basically, how the male gaze has dictated all of cinematic language for a really long time. I had this kind of epiphany watching that film, that I was so uncomfortable with being objectified in the way that I knew I needed to be, as an actress at that age, that it was hard.

It’s like, “Yeah, I did Law and Order, and I got raped on Law and Order, and then, I got raped on Numbers, and then I did Sopranos.” But the original part I’d auditioned for on The Sopranos was a stripper in the club, who had to be topless, and then got killed with a brick. I remember auditioning for that part, and going, “Oh my God, I don’t think I can do this part.”

Then they gave me this other part, and that was my role on Sopranos. Not that stripper part, but that’s what I’d gone in for. It was hard to be like, “Oh, these are the stories that are out there, and this is what’s available to me, and isn’t there more to me than this? Don’t I have something else to offer, besides walking around with my tits out, in front of all the lead characters on this show?”

So yeah, I think it was a little heartbreaking, actually, to get out in the world and realize what the business was. That was part of my transition into, “Oh wait, what if I could tell these stories? And what if I could have some control over the narrative, and what’s going out in the world, and write great parts for women and create roles for women, based on the women that I knew, or my experience of being a woman that felt much more compelling and complicated than anything I was seeing or participating in?”

Debbie Millman:

I love that your first foray into professional writing seems to have utilized your acting skills, in that you told this group of men that you were a screenplay writer, or that you had a treatment, while you were bartending. And I’m wondering if you can share a little bit of that story with our listeners, because I think it took a lot of balls to do something like that.

This is when you moved to Los Angeles, I believe, right? I wasn’t entirely sure if that had happened in LA or New York.

Sian Heder:

Where did you find that story? I’m like, “Why did I tell that story?” It’s so funny. Yes, I had moved out to LA.

I went to New York, I had been in this off-Broadway show for over a year, and I’d gone to New York with this kind of idealized, “I want to be a theater actor. I’m not moving to LA, because I want to do theater.”

I did this off-Broadway show, and it just ran, it was eight shows a week, for over a year. And I thought, “Well, maybe theater isn’t the thing I thought it was.”

I had moved out to LA, and I was already interested in writing. Because I think when I first moved out to LA, there was, I don’t know if you know the Naked Angels company, but it was a New York theater company that also had a presence in LA, and would do these nights called Tuesdays at Nine, where it was at a bar.

It was at St. Nick’s pub, and writers would come, and actors would come, and writers would bring in 10 pages of whatever they were working on, and actors would come and cold read the pages. And it was just a really fun way to hear your work out loud, and for everyone to socialize in a training ground, really, for everybody.

So I’d been going to Tuesdays at Nine as an actor, and I had been thinking about writing. Writing was always something that I loved and did for me, and it was my own outlet, but it was never something that I thought, “Oh, I should be a writer, or put this into the world.”

And then, yes, I was bartending at this place called [Leduc 00:21:34], and it was super scene-y. They had this Monday night party that was always very celebrity heavy, and hard to get into.

There was this thing, that would happen whenever I was bartending, and people would say, “Oh, what do you do?” I’d say, “I’m an actor.” And they’d kind of go, “Oh,” have a little pity on their face, and give me sad eyes, and be, “How’s that going for you?”

I got so tired of that look, that whole reaction. And yes, one night. There were these guys at the bar. And they say, “What do you do?” I just said, “I’m a writer.”

And they said, “Oh, what do you write?” I said, “Oh, I’m working on this movie.” And I told them the story of this crazy thing that had happened to my neighbor.

This was honestly just me entertaining myself, trying to get through my night. The guy was like, “Well, that’s actually really good. Do you have a treatment based on that? I’m actually a producer, I would love to take you out.”

And I’m thinking, “This guy is full of shit, and he’s hitting on me, or I don’t know what,” but I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I have a treatment.” He’s like, “Oh, well, you should call me.” So he gave me his card, and I threw it in my tip bucket.

And I remember, at the end of the night, I was counting my tips, and I came across his card, and I’m like, “This guy is probably a creep, and I should not call him,” and whatever.

But it got me thinking about that story, and I was like, “No, actually, I should, and I should write a treatment for that. And I should call this guy, and see if it’s legit.” So I did, and I wrote a treatment, and he was legit, and he took me out, and we pitched it around town, and no one ended up buying it.

But it really got me going, “Oh wait, this is a story.” And then I wrote, my first movie that I ever wrote was that film. Because I was like, “Wait, this is good.”

Debbie Millman:

Oh, that was my question. Was that Mother?

Sian Heder:

No, it was not Mother.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, okay.

Sian Heder:

I wrote this screenplay that never got made, but it was the first screenplay I wrote, and I didn’t know anything about writing a movie, but I just was like, “Well, I’ve come this far. Now I’ve written a treatment, and I’ve kind of pitched it, and I think I should write this.”

So I wrote this movie, and I was really good friends with Zach Quinto, I still am. He was my good friend from college, and I sent it to Zach, who by the way, at that time, was also working as a waiter at the 101 Cafe.

I said, “Will you read this? I wrote a movie.” And he’s like, “Okay.” And he read it, and he called me, and he’s like, “Sian, I think you’re a writer.” He was the first person to say, he’s like, “You don’t know anything about doing this, and this is the first thing that came out of you, and I really think you’re a writer.”

So I ended up writing some more screenplays. I ended up writing Mother, the short, and applied to AFI directing Workshop for Women and got into that program.

But it was really so funny that it all started off of me bullshitting someone in the bar, but then going, “Oh, wait a second. Maybe I should actually do this.” And then, really diving in, and teaching myself to write.

I never was trained to do that, but I was always part of writer’s groups. I did a lot of labs and workshops, and I was always trying to build my film school experience, because I didn’t have that kind of formal training. And I really was hungry to learn from everyone I knew who was actually doing it.

Debbie Millman:

Your experience writing Mother was based on an encounter that you had, that actually inspired your writing that movie, from when you were a nanny. I’m wondering if you can share that experience, as well.

Sian Heder:

Yes, this is all around the same time. So, in my twenties, and I’ve just moved out to LA, and I’m working every job you can imagine, to try to make money.

So I’m driving a $500 Buick that I bought in New York, and drove across the country. I can’t even believe it made it.

Debbie Millman:

Wow. Wow. I can’t, either.

Sian Heder:

No, it’s insane. It was such a hilarious, velour bench seats, and it was like a drug dealing uncle car. So I moved out to LA, and I was working as a babysitter at all the four star hotels, and I was bartending at night at all these places, and waiting tables, and doing whatever, and I started, I was a babysitter at all of these really fancy hotels in LA.

I’d be going to the Bel-Air Hotel, and the Four Seasons, and glimpsing the wealth in LA, and coming in, and kind of having this little window into this whole world and culture, that I’d never been a part of before. And also, that very Upstairs, Downstairs thing, of being the help and being a fly on the wall for so many strange things that people assumed you weren’t paying attention to, because you were there as the nanny.

I had a really, really weird experience at the Four Seasons, actually, in the penthouse of the Four Seasons, where this mother had come to the hotel to have an affair, and she couldn’t bring her nanny, because the nanny would tell the husband and rat her out.

She’d never been alone with her toddler before. And she was having this meltdown, and it became very clear that she’d hired me to be her confidante and friend more than I was even there to watch the kid.

I mean, by the end of the night, she came home, was wasted, passed out on the ground drunk, and the baby was just wandering the room, with no crib in the room, and I didn’t know what to do with this toddler. And the hotel would not intervene in the situation.

They were like, “Well, this woman is a paying customer, and we can’t do anything, and if you want to call CPS, you can call Child Protective Services. We can’t do anything about it.”

I thought, “I’m only in this woman’s life for the night. I don’t know her story. I know what that can do, once you start that cycle of getting someone’s kid taken away.”

So I ended up having them send up a crib, and I put the baby in the crib, and I just left, and I cried the whole way home, because I just thought, “This is so bizarre.” And I wrote this scene, which to me felt like a horrible, tragic scene.

And I brought it into Tuesdays at Nine, this group that I was a part of, and actors read it out loud. And it was so funny.

Once we heard it out loud, it was so dark and so funny, and yet so tragic, and the fact that I’d been crying when I wrote it, but that then, it was so comedic, I was like, “Oh, there’s something really interesting here.” So that was the film that I applied to AFI with, and that became Mother.

Eventually, Mother did really well, and ended up going to Cannes, and then that blossomed out into the feature of Tallulah. But yes, it was all based on this kind of weird experience that I had.

Debbie Millman:

What I thought was really interesting about the transition, from Mother to Tallulah, was the name. The only one of the three main characters in Tallulah is not the mom. I’m wondering what sort of transition that was psychologically, for you to call the film Tallulah, and not a version of Mother, given that Tallulah was the only character not a mother.

Sian Heder:

It’s interesting. I mean, Tallulah was such a journey, in terms of uncovering what that film was about, and that story, what I was writing about.

Because, as I tell you this story, I was in my early twenties. I was living in LA. I had this tiny studio apartment, and this crap car, and I was so judgmental of these moms that I was encountering.

I really thought, “Oh, they don’t know what they’re doing.” And yes, there were bad moms, but there were also moms that were probably harried and overwhelmed and dealing with stuff. And it’s really easy when you’re young to come from a place of knowing better.

I definitely wrote Mother from this place, and then I wrote, Tallulah, I’d say the first draft of it was a very judgmental indictment of this mother character, Carolyn. It was, “Some women should not be mothers,” I would say” would be my thesis, when I started writing that film.

The movie took me nine years to get made. And over the course of that time, I was growing up, and I was having experiences, and not only growing up as a writer and director.

I was writing on Orange is the New Black, and I was at a certain age. But also, during the time it took me to get the film made, I became a mother.

I was someone who always loved kids, was great with kids, had that magical babysitter energy of coming in and being able to charm children immediately, and be super fun, and was so cocky going into being a mom. Because I knew it was something that I kind of was, inherently had in me.

And then, my daughter had colic, and never slept, and completely rocked my world. And I was so lost, and I felt like I didn’t know how to do it, and I was failing.

I was really an underslept, complete basket case, I’d say, for the first year of my daughter’s life. And also, juggling working, driving to the writers room, and feeling like I had to pretend like I wasn’t functioning on 40 minutes of sleep from the night before.

And I completely rewrote the film. I was like, “This movie is not about indicting this mother. This movie is about the complexities of motherhood, and the dark secret feelings that nobody can share about being a mom.”

So it is interesting, in a way, I think you’re calling out the name, and I do think that the movie was named in that early stage, and I do think it ended up being a film about all these secret motherhood conversations, that I think weren’t being had, and that it’s in all of us to be a mother, and we find different ways to do it. And yet, no one knows how to do it, and it’s an imperfect journey, and all of that.

And it’s interesting, I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about that till you said it, but why that title feels like the movie was named early on. And then, the film evolved so much over the time that I was rewriting it and rewriting it. So when I finally made it, it really was a movie about motherhood, but I don’t know if it started that way.

Debbie Millman:

My favorite dialogue in Tallulah is when Tammy Blanchard’s character asks Allison Janny’s character, if she’s a horrible person, and Allison’s character responds, “We’re all horrible, we’re all people.”

There’s so much unconditional compassion in that response. Wondering if you can talk a little bit about the notion of what horrible really means in our evaluation of being people.

Sian Heder:

I love that line, too, and I think that line sums up so much about the characters that interest me, and the stories that interest me. I really love good people making bad choices. I think we all contain multitudes, and have potential to be horrible, and have potential to be empathetic and beautiful, and I love the unconditional love of that moment.

Because I think, particularly with women, and around motherhood, and around all of it, I wrote a whole article about mom shaming after I made Tallulah, because it was something, especially when you have young children, it just seems so present in the world.

And I think there’s so much self-doubt that comes along with being a mother, where you’re constantly, “Oh, am I supposed to do that? Am I supposed to …”

It just happened to me the other day. My daughter had been lying a lot. All of a sudden, I’m like, “Oh, this is interesting, the lying, and how do you respond to the lying?”

I had a friend say, “Oh, you’re never supposed to call out the lying. You’re never supposed to say that’s a lie. That’s part of them evolving kind of their higher level thinking, and figuring out how to be a functioning human.”

I was like, “Oh, you’re never supposed to call out the lying?” It sent me into this spiral of, “Should I have not said something about that?”

Because I think, it’s so vulnerable to be a parent, and you’re constantly questioning, “What am I doing that’s going to screw up my kid, and put them in therapy later in life?”

So I guess I just love the compassion, particularly between women, in that moment of just, “It’s okay to be shitty sometimes, it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to fail. It’s okay. That is part of the ride that we’re on, being human,” and it’s about recognizing it, and acknowledging it, and changing it if you need to change it.

But it’s a part of the human experience. And I think the stories I’m most drawn to involve very messy people, and massy families, and a certain kind of dysfunction that still contains warmth.

Like you said, I mean, you were talking about my parents at the beginning of this. It’s like, those two things can exist together, the dysfunction and the love, and the messiness and the connection, in the middle of all of it.

Debbie Millman:

I have to just talk briefly about your time on Orange is the New Black. You wrote for the show from 2013 to 2016, and wrote my all-time favorite episode, titled Lesbian Request Denied, which was the third episode of Season One. And Episode One and Episode Two were great. They sort of set the stage for what the whole show was going to be about, in so many ways.

But I remember seeing Episode Three, and thinking, “Okay, okay, this show is really going to make a difference.” It’s so layered, in so many ways, that episode.

And the actresses, Laverne Cox and Uzo Aduba, featured prominently in this episode, and I think many people, including myself, were introduced to them for the first time at that moment. They were both nominated for Emmys for their roles.

Laverne Cox was the first transgender actor to be nominated for an acting award at the Emmys. What was it like writing for these characters? What gave you the sense that, for example, in order to really see Uzo Adubo’s character, she needed to pee on the ground, in front of Taylor Schilling’s character? One of the great moments in television time.

Sian Heder:

Oh my God, I have to tell you about that moment. I want to get to this larger point. But that was so funny, because we built a pee rig for Uzo, and the first time she did it, I will never forget that.

She sort of crouched down, and I remember shooting it, and the pee rig just exploded in the gushiest way ever. And we, the whole set, fell over, dying laughing, and Uzo just died laughing too. It was a massive horse pee coming out of this little woman.

That episode was amazing, and that show was amazing. I think, first of all, we didn’t really know what we were working on. Netflix wasn’t even a thing.

I remember getting that job and being, “What is Netflix? Is this an internet show? What is this thing?” Streaming was not a thing. They had us and House of Cards. We didn’t know what it was.

Obviously, I knew Jenji’s work. I was a big admirer of her and fan of her, and she is wonderful. One of the things Jenji did, which was so beautiful, which now, I try to embody as a showrunner, was just giving so much ownership of the show to her writers.

I think we all felt so invested, and so creatively involved, and to feel that kind of ownership when it is not your show that you’ve created, but you feel like you’ve been given the freedom to, “Hey, go create this character,” especially with Laverne’s character, Sophia, there wasn’t any trans representation on TV at that time.

Transparent had not come out. There was nothing to go and look at as an example of this. I felt huge responsibility to get it right.

Because I thought, “Oh my God, this is going to be this trans character on TV. And I’m not trans. I don’t have that experience. For me to write this, I need to majorly research this character.” And so I did.

I talked to so many trans women, and went to the trans support group in LA, and just really interviewed so many people, and talked to them. And then, it was so important to me, both with that character and with Suzanne, who was initially Crazy Eyes, and there was this kind of one note element to the ideas of both of those characters.

It’s like, “Okay, there’s kind of the, ‘Oh, it’s a trans character in prison, so it’s a former man in a woman’s prison. There’s so much scandal that can happen around that.'” And I was really invested in, I need this to be a central character that we’re following, and to understand her as a complex human on every level.

I remember having this conversation with the leader of the trans support group in LA, and she said, “Does this character have to be in prison?” I was like, “Well, she does have to be in prison, because they’re all in prison. It’s a show about prison.” And she said, “Oh, it’s just such a, whenever trans people are represented, they’re represented as criminals.”

She said, “I don’t love that she’s in prison, so can she be innocent? She should be innocent of her crime.” And I remember entertaining that idea, and thinking, “No,” and in fact, understanding her, and why she made the choices she made, and this idea that she has to be pure, to somehow counter trans representation that had existed, that she has to be this angel who’s all good, and I’m like, “This isn’t what this is. This is about making this character really complex, and understanding why she made the choices she made, and giving her many dimensions and aspects.”

So that was just a really interesting journey. And I remember being very fearful, putting that episode out in the world, and thinking, that I hoped that people could feel the work, and the intention behind it. And then, it was so beautiful, to watch what happened with Laverne, and with Uzo, but especially, watching Laverne.

And I remember a year later, seeing her on the cover of Time magazine, and going, “Oh my God, how beautiful.” I remember watching her audition tape, and being, “Oh my God, look at her. This is who Sophia is.” So I don’t know.

It’s really beautiful when, as a storyteller, you get to feel like a cog in the wheels of change, that you set the pebble rolling somehow, at the top of the hill, and it picked up more pebbles, And it became an avalanche. And then there was this massive sea change. It’s not because of what you did, but you are a part of that, and that is so fulfilling.

And I definitely had that, I think, in relation to that episode, and certainly with CODA, of feeling, “Oh, there’s a cultural shift happening. And my story got to be a part of that cultural shift.”

Debbie Millman:

So CODA won last year’s Best Film Oscar. I was so happy when that happened. You also won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

When you were first approached to Direct Coda, you hadn’t seen the original 2014 French film, La Famille Béliere, the story Coda is based on. What made you interested in this particular story?

Sian Heder:

I think it’s always striking when you’re presented with something and you think, “Oh, I can’t think of a film with a deaf family at the center of it.” The fact that that doesn’t exist in the world felt like a driving force to put it in the world.

When I did watch La Famille Bélier, the character at the center, was a very interesting CODA, as a child of deaf adults. And it’s very interesting to me that most deaf people have hearing children, and most deaf people are born to hearing parents.

There’s this cultural divide that happens, where a lot of times, CODAs, who are growing up with deaf parents, in a way, grow up more embedded in deaf culture than a lot of deaf people did as kids. Because they had hearing parents that maybe didn’t sign, or live within the deaf community.

So that idea of someone who was part of these two worlds, and also, part of neither, and living in this limbo, where they culturally felt connected to a community that they actually aren’t a part of, which is the deaf community.

I had a beautiful thing that a CODA friend said to me the other day, when she was trying to talk about being a hearing person, growing up in a deaf family.” She said, “I lived in the oppressor’s body. So even though I was their child, and I was this, I also represented the world that had been oppressive and horrible and exclusionary. And holding those things, and holding that duality, was a really complicated thing to grow up with.”

That was very intriguing to me in that character, and exploring what that was, and having a teenage girl at the center, where her feelings were not marginalized, her feelings were actually the stakes of the movie, was exciting to me. So, all of those things, and then, really, the deep dive that I got to do with the deaf community, and it’s changed my life.

It’s changed my life, not just as an artist, but it really has changed my life, period. There is this idea of who should be writing what, which I think is very real, and those conversations need to be happening. And I was fully aware that I was a hearing person coming to this deaf story about a culture that was not mine.

But what that meant is, I had to come in as this very pure listener, and know what I didn’t know, and really put a team around me of deaf collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. But these moments that are almost embarrassing, when you have them, and I set up the living room of this family, and I remember Anne walking onto set and going, “No deaf family would ever set up their living room this way. Deaf spaces are circular. Everybody needs to see everybody else.”

The living room’s not centered on the TV in the same way. It’s centered on having a conversation with each other. The couch would be facing where they could see the door. They would want to know who was coming in and out. So there were all these moments where you went, “Oh, I’m such a dumb ass. What was I thinking with the furniture?” But I had that push and pull.

I had the people there as a team, to kind of go, “Hey, no.” It was a really powerful, amazing experience to make that film, not just in the writing of it, but in the way we reimagined what a set could be, the way we shot it, put it together, even the year-long press tour. I think it was a very transformative experience for everyone involved in the film, and especially me.

Debbie Millman:

One of the really remarkable things about CODA was the way in which deafness was portrayed. In the past, hearing characters spoke out loud the entire time. And you talked about Marlee Matlin in the 1986 film, Children of a Lesser God, a movie that she won an Oscar for, playing the role she played.William Hertz’s character speaks all the lines out loud.

And you look back at a movie like that, or even other movies that are much more recent, where the hearing character becomes the dominant character, just because they are reciting or sharing the reality that the non-speaking person is having. Instead, in CODA, you provide the audience with the experience of what it’s like to really watch an ASL conversation taking place, with the various sounds that you hear, the clothing, the fingers moving, slapping.

I know that you put a mic on Marlee Matlin, who was surprised, because she’s usually not mic’d. Because you specifically wanted that physical experience.

Sian Heder:

I think sound is very important to hearing people. And you watch people who haven’t encountered an interpreter and a deaf person together before, and you will watch hearing people look at the interpreter, as they’re talking. As the deaf person is signing, they will look at the interpreter, and then they will address their question or their answer to the interpreter, because they’re sort of drawn to the sound.

It’s like, “Well, this is the person who’s talking,” as opposed to, “This is the person that actually should be, the interpreter’s there to voice the deaf person.” I’m watching it, and I think it’s almost like, it’s a process people have to go through to go, “Okay, let me become comfortable in this moment, giving my attention to the person who might not be actually speaking.”

So I knew that if Ruby voiced her parents, or if Ruby talked too much in the movie, hearing people would glom onto that. Or it’s almost like a safety net, like, “Oh, I feel safer in this scene, because I have this touchstone of this person speaking.”

So silence was a really big part of the movie for me, and figuring out, yes, an audience will be uncomfortable for the first couple scenes, a hearing audience will be, and they are going to have to get into a different rhythm, and a different way of watching and listening visually, as opposed to actually listening. And that’s cool. And let me force the audience into that experience gradually.

I was careful in the early parts of the movie to make sure that there would be an ASL scene, and then there would be a music scene, or a dialogue scene, and then, towards the back half of the movie, I think there’s six scenes in a row which are all silent ASL scenes, because at that point, I think the audience is fully immersed in this family, and you don’t even notice.

I loved that audience members came up to me after the movie, and was like, “I didn’t even notice that I was watching ASL.” Someone even said to me, “I felt like I was hearing Frank’s Boston accent.” I’m like, “Yeah, you do. He does have a Boston accent, but he has it through sign.”

Sound was so important in the intimacy of an ASL conversation where, if you’re angry, and you say, “Stop,” and you hit your hand really hard with the side of your other hand, which is the sign for “Stop,” it makes a noise. And I really wanted the sound mix to allow the audience to really participate in the intimacy of the language, and the physicality, and the sound your hands make when they brush up against your clothes, when you’re saying “excited,” or the little verbalizations that come out, or sounds that come out, which are so important.

So yeah, I really worked, not only to mic, and my sound department on set, but then, as we were working on the sound design, to elevate and bring up all those small intimate sounds, to fill those scenes, so you really didn’t have to fill them with music. You got to be in the silence, that wasn’t actually silence.

Debbie Millman:

Well, speaking of silence and sound, I want to talk to you about one of the episodes you wrote of Little America. So your latest effort is the Apple TV show, Little America. You co-showrun the show with Lee Eisenberg, who created the concept for the show with Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon.

The first of the two episodes that you wrote in Season One, it’s an episode called The Silence, which changed rather dramatically from the first cut. It’s a really surprising episode. It was actually the first episode I watched. At first, I was a little bit like, “Wait, what? What’s happening here?”

Sian Heder:

“What is this show?” It’s the weird one from first season, so it’s funny to start with that one.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah, I did, but because you wrote it, and I wanted to get the whole experience of it. I have since read that it dramatically changed from that first cut, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the episode evolved.

I’m aware that we might be putting up some spoilers for those that might not have seen the episode. So if you are about to see it, you might not want to listen to the next five minutes.

Sian Heder:

Yeah, that episode. So it’s called The Silence. It’s about a woman who comes to a silent retreat, and the whole episode is basically in silence for the first 10 minutes or so of the episode, and falls in love with this man, and has this silent love affair that unfolds.

But when I first wrote the episode, there are these dharma talks that happen at these silent retreats, sometimes, where they’re the leader will take you through a spiritual talk every day. Zach Quinto was playing that leader, who’s an old friend of mine, and I talked him into coming to do an episode of Little America. I’m like, “Come and do this.”

And he gave these Buddhist kind of speeches through the episode. So when we shot it, there was a fair amount of using these talks to do this sort of narration throughout.

As we were editing, Lee and I were in the editing room, Lee was like, “It’s a silent episode. It’s about silence. Should we just cut all this?”

And I, of course, had a moment of, “Oh my God, I’m going to cut all my friends’ lines. I’ve talked him into coming and doing this episode, and then, I’m going to cut every single one of his line? That’s a phone call that I have to make.”

But it was such an exciting idea, to then go, “Oh yeah, we can make this work. The whole point of the episode is living in the silence.”

It was interesting that I was making that episode in the lead up to COA. I was starting to prep CODA, as I was working on that episode. As I had started auditioning deaf actors for CODA, a lot of what I was hearing is, “Deaf actors never get to play hearing.”

Not only is it wrong in so many ways when hearing actors go and play deaf roles, but it doesn’t go the other way, like deaf actors don’t get to go and just play a hearing role. But when I was directing The Silence, I thought, “Oh, this is a perfect opportunity for deaf actors to get to come and play hearing.”

I actually cast two deaf actresses in the whole retreat as part of the ensemble, because nobody was speaking, and it was all kind of physical, but it was really such an amazing lesson to see something evolve so much in the edit, really take the footage we had shot, and get to come in, and kind of completely reinvent the episode in the edit, and realize how much is possible editorially, in terms of getting to rediscover your story, and make a big swing on how you’re going to do it.

That experience, working on The Silence, was so valuable to me when I went into the edit on CODA, because I think it had freed me up from a lot of ideas about, “Oh, well, when I shot this scene, this is what I thought.” It’s like, “Well, I could steal that from that scene, and that shot from that scene, I could build a whole new scene that never even existed.”

So it was very exciting, I think, creatively, with my editor, Geraud, who also worked on Little America, to get to go into the edit on CODA, and feel really free, in terms of, “Now I have all this footage, I had all these ideas when I wrote it, I had all these ideas when I shot it. I get to come in fresh now, almost like I’m just discovering raw material that’s here, and what are we going to make with this?”

So my experience on The Silence felt very connected to, I think, a freedom that I had editorially, once I went into working on CODA.

Debbie Millman:

Little America is an anthology series, and it’s based on true stories that go beyond the headlines, to look at real and unexpected lives of immigrants in America. How did you find all of these true stories?

Sian Heder:

It’s an amazing process. I think the way Little America is made is so unique, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it, or been a part.

It’s somewhere between journalism and narrative writing, and we find people from all places. The show is made in partnership with Epic Magazine. So we have journalists at Epic, who are doing a lot of footwork, to go out and find interesting people. Most of the stories are not, these are not famous people, generally. They’re not people who you would know.

They’re small stories that are interesting, that might have been in a local paper, if they were anywhere, or they’re not. They’re just somebody’s life, that we find, there’s some small nugget of something captivating in there.

So sometimes, they come from a friend of a friend, or one of our writers has a friend. Sometimes, our writers, it’s their own experience. Tze Chun, first season, and Darya Zhuk, second season, both told their own stories. Really, what we’re looking for, I think is, they’re kind of funny and quirky, and odd, a lot of them, and together, I think, create a tapestry of the immigrant experience.

And what I said early on is, I had immigrant parents that both came here for such different reasons. My dad was escaping war, and my mom was coming because she felt like she couldn’t be fully expressed as an artist in Wales. She had to be a good little Welsh girl, and couldn’t become the kind of creative person she needed to be.

Both of those are valid reasons to come to this country. And both of those things have challenges and hardship involved in them. The stakes might be different, but they’re both interesting and worthy of being told. So that’s really our process is, we find someone we think is interesting. We do a series of interviews. It could be up to six or seven interviews, sometimes, where we’re going back.

I find that often, what people think is the story of their lives is not the actual interesting story. So oftentimes, with our subjects, they’ll put this thing forward, that they think is the most fascinating thing, about their story or their lives, and then you continue to talk to them.

And then, somewhere in the conversation, it’s like, “Yeah, but actually, I had this really weird relationship with my brother,” and they sort of brush over this thing. But you, as the interviewer, kind of go, “Oh, wait.” You do it well, so you know.

You go, “What was that thing that you said about your brother? There seemed there was something there,” and then, you go down that rabbit hole for awhile. So the journey of finding what the story we’re telling is such a long, interesting process.

And then, we take all these interviews that we’ve had with this person, and we go into a writers room. And most of our writers are either children of immigrants, or have that background themselves.

So we’re talking about the stories, and dissecting them, and kind of going, “Is this it?” Then we go back and we re-interview the people, to try to dig down that channel. It’s such a cool, evolving, amazing process, and I love where we get to.

It’s so intense when we show our subjects. The episode, which, I just had that experience on Little America, Season two, is finishing the season before it came out. We screened the episode individually for people, so they could kind of watch it in private and have a reaction to it.

And it’s so intense. It’s so intense, because you feel, as a writer and showrunner and creative, you’ve been trusted with people’s lives. These are not people that are Hollywood people, that are used to putting themselves out there.

So it’s a very vulnerable act for them to talk to us, and share some of the stuff they do. And they don’t know what we’re going to end up telling a story about. So I think there’s always this element sup of surprise, “that that’s what you saw, or that’s what you heard in my story.”

It was so beautiful to show these episodes to the subjects. It was one of the most powerful parts of making the show was just having these little private screenings, with just me and one person, and showing the episode, and talking to them afterwards about it.

It’s very beautiful, because they’re normal people who haven’t been recognized in that way. And I think there’s often a feeling of, “Oh, is my story worthy? Is my life a life that is worthy of being told?”

That’s such a cool aspect to the show. I feel like it’s very raw, because we just went through it, and I just had all these screenings for the subjects. It was very cool.

Debbie Millman:

Well, that’s what makes, I think, this whole anthology so special. You could be watching somebody from Belize or Sri Lanka, or Japan or El Salvador, and you can relate so much to the experiences, because it’s not just about being an immigrant, although that’s certainly a part of it, but it’s also about being so human, and how we all struggle with our relationships with our parents, or connect with our children.

And I’m wondering if the commonalities surprised you. I mean, I do visual storytelling workshops all over the world, and I find that no matter where I go, I could be in Dubai, I could be in Mexico, I could be in Japan. And everybody’s telling the same stories, love, loss, longing.

Sian Heder:

Well, we’re all horrible, and we’re all people.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, there we go.

Sian Heder:

But I think it’s really teaches you that specificity leads to universality. When you are so specific, and you are able to create authenticity, with everything surrounding a theme, or an emotion, in a way, that theme or emotion is allowed to fully reveal itself as being powerful, because maybe you’re watching someone from another culture than you, speaking another language than you.

So it feels like there should be this distance. Or you feel like there should be this sense of other, and yet you’re like, “I know that feeling.”

In all of these conversations about diversity, I feel like there’s this idea, “Oh, it’s important to learn about people from another culture. Because that’s a good thing to do, is learn about people that are different from you.”

And I think what diverse storytelling does is show us that we’re all the same, is show us that we all care about love, that we all care about getting approval from our parents, that we all care. Because those things transcend culture, and language, and all those things.

So yes, I love that part of Little America that you are watching an episode about a Sri Lankan girl and a Kiss a Car contest. And it seems like, “What a silly contest, to kiss a car for as long as you possibly can,” And I’ll say, “What is that about?”

Debbie Millman:

She did it for 50 hours.

Sian Heder:

50 hours.

Debbie Millman:

50 hours. She made it.

Sian Heder:

This is what I mean as a writer, too. You are drawn to that story, because you’re like, “Oh, this is quirky, right? It’s a girl in a Kiss a Car contest, and she kisses a car for 50 hours, to win the car.”

The more we talked to the subject, the more it became clear that her parents had come to this country from Sri Lanka, with incredible expectations for her. Her father was an engineer in Sri Lanka, and was working as a janitor in the US, so …

Debbie Millman:

I know. That broke my heart.

Sian Heder:

All his expectations, hopes, dreams of what this country was going to fulfill, got placed onto his daughter, who was kind of wayward, and feeling like a loser, and couldn’t keep a job. The weight of those expectations was actually paralyzing.

And then, this Kiss a Car contest, which should have been this silly thing that she chose to participate in, took on huge emotional stakes, because it felt like her chance for redemption. And it felt like her chance to suddenly be something in her father’s eyes.

So I love that, that we unlock it, as a writer’s room. We kind of go, “What is this about? What is this about?” You talk a lot, and you go, “Oh my God, I think this is about redemption. This is about this woman who feels like a failure, seeing a path to her father’s approval.

Once you have that, you can kind of have all the silly characters. You can have the characters that participate in these kind of endurance contests, but you’ve unlocked the thing at the center, which is that very universal feeling. Each one of the episodes really feels that way to me, that we spend a lot of time going, “Okay, this happened, but what did it mean? What did it mean to this person?”

Generally, the episodes end up being very moving, because they do resonate. They hit some inherent universal human emotion, I think, that we’ve all gone through at some point, be they family, whatever it is, the essence of what it is to be human, and try to make it through this weird, messed up world.

Debbie Millman:

There’s so much more I want to talk to you about Little America. I’ll just leave it as saying that the first three episodes of Season Two are just required watching for all humans, Mr. Song, ninth caller, bra Whisperer, some of the best television I’ve seen in a very long time.

But speaking of being human, I read that a possible next project for you, is adapting disability activist Judith Heumann’s memoir, Being Heumann. And I read that Ali Stroker, the first actress to appear on Broadway using a wheelchair, who won a Tony for her role in Oklahoma, might be starring in it. Is any of that true?

Sian Heder:

All of this is true, all of this is true.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, good.

Sian Heder:

I found Judy … Yes. I mean, I think it’s like what I was saying. I think I had such a massive education on CODA. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, which is just the massive lack of representation that exists, regarding characters with disabilities, and centering that story. And also, that the disability rights movement was a massive civil rights movement that nobody knows about. We didn’t learn it in school.

Debbie Millman:

Right.

Sian Heder:

And when I saw Crip Camp, I remember being, “Why didn’t we know about this?” You’re sort of aware that there’s more ramps than there used to be, or that there’s curb cuts now, and there didn’t used to be, but you don’t understand that there was a very forceful and driven and ferocious group of activists, that were working to make that happen. And Judy was kind of at the center of that.

She has such an amazing story, and it’s been so much fun to, I’m in the process of writing it right now, but just talk to, not only Judy, but everybody who is there. The 504 sit-in was the longest sit-in in history, where a group of about 100 disabled people took over a federal building, and held it for 30 days. And it’s a wild story.

I’ve been deep in talking to people, and researching, and figuring out what went down. It happened in 1977, so of course, everyone I’m talking to has a different memory of the event.

So it’s been really funny, to talk to all these people and be like, “Oh, really? That’s what you think happened? Because that’s not the story that I heard this morning.”

It’s quite exciting. And so yes, I’ve been working with Judy on that, and it’s a project that I feel very excited about. And also, in terms of, once I saw the experience on CODA, and that we could transform the set, and our way of working, and it’s very important to me that the stories that I tell continue to center people who haven’t been centered, and push the envelope, in terms of what conversations we’re having as a culture, and who we’re including, and who we’re leaving out, and I think, can also be very entertaining and funny as well.

It doesn’t need to be, “Take your medicine, eat your spinach, this is something you that would be good to know about, or good to watch.” I think these stories can be really fun and exciting. So yes, I’m very excited about that one.

Debbie Millman:

I can’t wait to see it, I can’t wait. Sian, I want to close the show today with a quote of yours. I found in my research, that I think everyone in the world should hear.

You’ve said that, “The day when you start having no self-doubt, you’re fucked. You should always be pushing yourself to be better, than you are to have people challenge your choices. That’s what makes great work.”

Sian Heder:

I’m happy to hear that quote from you, because I need that right now, honestly. I’m at the point where I want to roll up my Oscar in bags, and stick it under my couch, because I can’t look at it.

Because it’s like, you’re writing a horrible scene. And you’re looking at the Oscar, like, “Oh, my gosh. Do you know that I don’t know how to do this?”

But I think living in that place of fear actually means you’re making good work. Because you’re pushing yourself into uncharted territory, and that’s a good place to live as an artist.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s what my therapist has been telling me. So I’m glad to hear it from you too.

Sian Heder, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.

Sian Heder:

Thank you for having me, this was so much fun. It was truly one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you. You can see Sian Heder’s films, CODA and Tallulah, on streaming services. Also, listeners look up Dog Eat Dog on YouTube. You will not be unhappy about that one. And you can watch Little America on Apple TV.

This is the eighteenth year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference.

We could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Siân Heder appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Speaker 1:

This archival episode of Design Matters was recorded in January of 2017. This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman from designobserver.com.

Speaker 1:

For 12 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman talks with Brian Koppelman about why he became a writer after years as a record promoter and producer.

Brian Koppelman:

I realized I would become toxic and that something would die in me and that if I allowed that to happen, that toxicity would spread to those that I love.

Speaker 1:

Here’s Debbie Millman.

Debbie Millman:

Brian Koppelman makes media, a lot of media: films, TV shows, podcasts, records. As for movies, he co-wrote Ocean’s Thirteen and Rounders. He produced the Illusionist and the Lucky Ones, and he’s directed many others. His podcast on Slate, which covers pop culture and politics is called The Moment. He’s the co-creator and showrunner for the TV show Billions, which is about to start its second season on Showtime. If that’s not enough Brian Koppelman for you, he’s also a prolific and voracious tweeter.

Debbie Millman:

He’s here today to go way beyond 140 characters and talk about his career, his productions, and his politics. Brian Koppelman, welcome to Design Matters.

Brian Koppelman:

I’m so happy to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Brian is it true that your father’s uncle, a man named Morris Koppelman, created a patent for making the first ever egg carton?

Brian Koppelman:

Seth Godin gave you that for sure.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, no, he did not.

Brian Koppelman:

Definitely, ’cause we’ve had a long talk about it. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Really, you did? I swear to God, he did not.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, that’s his favorite fact-

Debbie Millman:

Oh, of course, it is.

Brian Koppelman:

… to go back and forth on.

Debbie Millman:

That’s why we love each other.

Brian Koppelman:

We talk about it.

Debbie Millman:

Yep.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, my dad’s, I think, great, great-

Debbie Millman:

Uncle, yeah.

Brian Koppelman:

… uncle Morris has a patent for the egg carton. That’s true.

Debbie Millman:

Is the family still receiving residuals, royalties?

Brian Koppelman:

No, no. Morris was a great inventor and, I think, a bad businessman.

Debbie Millman:

Aren’t they almost always? Other than Steve Jobs and maybe one or two others.

Brian Koppelman:

Yes, there’s nothing but familial pride is about all that we got out of that.

Debbie Millman:

Was he also an egg farmer?

Brian Koppelman:

All I know about him is the legend and then because there was no financial benefit, at a certain point, my sisters and I became really skeptical of that story. It sounded made up. When the internet got really good and thorough, I did search for it at some point just to see if it was true and it turned out to be true.

Debbie Millman:

Well, just so you know, I found it on your father’s Wikipedia page.

Brian Koppelman:

Great.

Debbie Millman:

You grew up on Long Island, I believe in Roslyn, and I understand that you have an undying and sometimes heretical love for pizza. Is there a pizza place I need to know about in Roslyn? I grew up there too.

Brian Koppelman:

This podcast can become very long because there are few things about which I call myself an expert, but pizza is one of them. The old slice joints that I probably went to as a kid are mostly gone and Long Island’s had an explosion of gourmet pizza, supposed gourmet pizza. I think Joanne’s Pizza on Long Island is really great.

Debbie Millman:

What’s your favorite pizza joint in Manhattan?

Brian Koppelman:

Sal & Carmine’s. If you go to Sal & Carmine’s on a 101st Street and Broadway, but you have to go when they’re making hot, fresh pies. Don’t get an old pie. You have to get a slice of one that just came out of the pizza oven. Their crust is different than anybody’s else and they’re really famous. They’ve been there for like 70 years.

Debbie Millman:

I mention your father. He is a major business titan when you were growing up. He was the general manager of worldwide publishing for CBS Records and chairman of EMI Music Publishing. He’s worked with legends like Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Cher, Billy Joel, the list goes on and on. What was that like for you growing up with a father that was so powerful?

Brian Koppelman:

That’s not the way in which I thought of him. In fact, he wouldn’t have called himself a business titan. He ran EMI later when I was in college, out of college, actually. He was a record maker really. That’s really what he did. I grew up-

Debbie Millman:

He discovered people, right?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Didn’t he discover Phoebe Snow and Janis Ian-

Brian Koppelman:

Many people-

Debbie Millman:

… some of the greats. Yeah.

Brian Koppelman:

The Lovin’ Spoonful and songwriters like Tim Hardin. The great benefit that I had was I grew up in recording studios. I would spend all night with him. He was a great dad. He still is. He would bring me with him ’cause his hours were strange when you’re in that business.

Brian Koppelman:

When he was making Barbara Streisand’s records, he was picking the songs that she would record and he was in the studio overseeing the recordings. He would bring me with him. So, I’d be 11 or 12 years old-

Debbie Millman:

So, you were 11 or 12 years old hanging out with Barbara Streisand?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah. For me, the great thing was getting to hang out with the musicians. The studio players in those days were people who also made records. The people in bands like Toto and a bunch of other really famous bands, those guitar players and bass players and drummers, when they weren’t on the road, they would be the backing bands for all these singers. So, I would get to hang out with those guys and that was a trip to me. They’d talk to me and that was a great education.

Brian Koppelman:

I was always really interested in how people lived the life of an artist, even when I was really young. I would constantly ask about how they did it and why they did it. That was the other thing. When did you first fall in love with the bass guitar? That stuff was always incredibly animating to me.

Brian Koppelman:

That part of growing up with somebody who did that was an absolute joy for me. My favorite thing to do was go spend time in a recording studio.

Debbie Millman:

You started managing local Long Island bands when you-

Brian Koppelman:

Well, how could I not at that point? Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

… were 13. But, 13? I’d say you’d go to these local bands and you were a kid and you must have looked like a kid.

Brian Koppelman:

I really did look like a kid.

Debbie Millman:

Did they take you seriously to be their manager at 13?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, I could talk.

Debbie Millman:

Even back then?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Any bands that we might recognize at that point?

Brian Koppelman:

The best guitarist in my school, he was a really incredibly gifted guitar player. His name was Peter Zizzo. I managed his band, which really just meant getting them some gigs or convincing a club owner to book an underage band.

Brian Koppelman:

He ended up becoming a really successful songwriter. Celine Dion’s recorded like eight of his songs and he worked with Avril Lavigne and many other very famous people. He and I grew up together doing this stuff.

Debbie Millman:

I believe that you first met the comedian Eddie Murphy and orchestrated his first record deal through the machinations of booking bands at local nightclubs. Is it true that we have you to thank for the hit single, Party All the Time?

Brian Koppelman:

Sure. You could say that.

Debbie Millman:

How did you make that happen? Was it through the different connections that you’d already established? What made you decide that Eddie Murphy was ripe for recording?

Brian Koppelman:

I was managing this folk singer, I won’t say his name, but he had a very, very Jewish name. I knew Eddie Murphy has just been on one year of SNL and he was a featured player. I got this guy … His last name was Horowitz, and I got him to open for Eddie at this local club and he just got booed off the stage. The second he walked out, someone in the audience just was like, “I thought Eddie Murphy was black.” They shouted and then the whole audience laughed at Ethan.

Brian Koppelman:

At one point, the lights went down because he went from guitar to piano and then they all cheered that he was done. Then, when it came up and he was sitting at the piano, they booed. It was a terrible night. He was only like 16 or 17. I was 15 or 16, but I hung around after to watch Eddie.

Brian Koppelman:

Eddie hit the stage and he tore it up like nobody I’d ever seen in my life, that amount of charisma, the power that he had, his ability to improvise and make the whole club fall in love with him. So, I snuck backstage after and I introduced myself. I said, “Why aren’t you making albums?” I met his manager and then I went home and I woke my father in the middle of the night and I said, “This guy’s a comedian, but he’s a rock star. You have to make a record with him.”

Brian Koppelman:

The next day, they got together and made a deal and then made those three first Eddie Murphy comedy albums, Eddie Murphy: Comedian and Delirious. I think Raw might have also been in that same thing.

Debbie Millman:

Ah, so Part All the Time wasn’t really-

Brian Koppelman:

I wasn’t involved with … No, Party All the Time was on that first album.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, okay. I didn’t even realize that.

Brian Koppelman:

As was Boogie in the Butt.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Brian Koppelman:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Okay. Who knew?

Brian Koppelman:

Oh, yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you for clarifying. I know you went to Tufts University and you majored in English. At that point, were you planning on going into the music business?

Brian Koppelman:

I thought that I probably would, but I was always a huge reader. Reading was … Listening to music, watching movies, seeing comedians, and reading and the New York Knicks were the things that I cared the most about. I would never have called myself a writer at that time, but I was, in the back of my mind, there was some sort of an idea that expressing myself in that way was something that I should probably do.

Debbie Millman:

While at Tufts, and this is a fairly famous story for people that are aware of your wide body of work, you discovered the amazing singer-songwriter, Tracy Chapman. I believe that this was during a boycott of the university because of its endowment. Was she protesting? Was she doing protest songs?

Brian Koppelman:

We were protesting. And, yeah. Tracy for sure was always doing protest songs. Her work was certainly in a strong social justice tradition from the very beginning. The first song on her first album is Talking About a Revolution, which sounds like a whisper. As you know, she became famous because she played at the Free Nelson Mandela thing. Yeah, that was always a bedrock cornerstone part of what she did.

Brian Koppelman:

I was in college from 84 to 88 and at that time, many colleges were invested in companies doing business with South Africa and this was during Apartheid South Africa. As students became aware of it, particularly in the Northeast, they decided to try to change that policy. I was one of the people leading that movement at Tufts.

Brian Koppelman:

We had organized an all-day boycott of classes in a sign of protest and were going to have performers. A friend of mine said, “Oh, you should see this woman, Tracy Chapman. She would be good to play at this rally.” I went to see her and then when I did, it was a true epiphanic moment. I’ve rarely experienced something like that. When I met my wife and when I walked into a poker club years later and realized that was a movie. Moments where you feel like from somewhere you’re just completely dumbstruck. You have an insight that you didn’t even know you wanted to have before.

Brian Koppelman:

When I say Tracy, she played Talking About a Revolution and a song called Across the Lines and I couldn’t believe the voice she had and the songs she was singing and what she was singing about and her presence. The next two years of my life were really just focused on finding a way to get her music to the world.

Debbie Millman:

I have moments where a song that I hear for the first time makes an indelible mark in me. I don’t forget where I was, what I was wearing, what I was thinking, what I was doing. Fast Car was one of those songs.

Brian Koppelman:

Sure. Yeah. That happened to many people.

Debbie Millman:

I remember the moment I heard it.

Brian Koppelman:

Where were you?

Debbie Millman:

I was in an office. I’m a little bit older than you are. I was in an office. It came on the radio and I stopped. I just stopped and made everybody stop. I just needed to listen to this song. I was wearing this ridiculous 80s business outfit and had big 80s hair and I was listening to this song.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, it was an incredible thing to be a small part of.

Debbie Millman:

A small part? You executive produced her first album.

Brian Koppelman:

She wrote and sang the cards. I helped.

Debbie Millman:

She received six Grammy awards.

Brian Koppelman:

I helped. I helped, but she did it.

Debbie Millman:

If you had described her to a record executive at the time, she would have hardly seemed a success slam dunk.

Brian Koppelman:

No, that’s true. They all passed on her when we brought Tracy around to the record companies only once. Most of them passed. It was a great, really empowering lesson.

Brian Koppelman:

I was young enough that I thought it was outrageous that they would pass. I knew how great she was and I didn’t care about their commercial considerations or the way in which they would frame their commercial considerations seemed absurd to me. But, I watched a group think about a performer like that at that time and it really was an empowering thing that I took forward to that even when I switched and became an artist and started writing, I never lost sight of the fact that experts are really often wrong about something new. The more stridently they state that position and stake out the lines of their terrain, the more wrong that they are.

Debbie Millman:

Why do you think that is?

Brian Koppelman:

Because it’s scary to say yes to something and it’s easy to say no. I think that if I want to look at it charitably, these people had probably taken risks and those risks had gone poorly for them or they’d been chastised for suggesting that their bosses look at something that was outside of the mainstream.

Brian Koppelman:

As I’ve seen it repeat itself in the movie business and the television business, I realize that they’re all working from a place of what essentially what was successful six months ago, three months ago. It’s the very rare person who can understand that they should think about none of that and they should, especially if we’re talking about the arts, that they should just check in with themselves and figure out if they were moved by it. Because if a piece of art can really move you, then it can move many, many, many people. We’re all different, but we are, at core, quite similar.

Brian Koppelman:

The thing that I saw was whenever Tracy would perform, people would start crying. If she had that effect on these people and on me and on … Really there were nights when I would be the only male in the room. She was playing to groups of 300 women. I would watch. It hit the same way it hit them and then we would go to New Hampshire or somewhere else in Massachusetts. It didn’t matter where she performed. It didn’t matter whether the people knew her music ahead of time. When she would talk on stage, they’d fall to pieces. That was an incredibly rare thing.

Brian Koppelman:

So, I never doubted it. I didn’t know she was going to sell 13 million albums, but I knew she was a once in lifetime recording artist.

Debbie Millman:

In an interview you had with Tim Ferris on his podcast, you stated that you learned about rejection from the music business. Watching experts be wrong over and over made it not crushing to face your own rejection. How open are you to rejection? Do you take it in stride? I’m enormously sensitive to if somebody doesn’t like the way my hair looked that day, so …

Brian Koppelman:

Well, you’ve got to separate the initial emotional reaction. I’m not impervious to pain, but I very quickly go from the sting of it very quickly to an analytical place. Very, very quickly to, “Okay, what’s the merit in this point of view? Does something in the work have to change? If it does, how do I change it? If not, move on. Ignore the rejection.” Because I’ve seen it play out so many times.

Brian Koppelman:

When we wrote our first screenplay, just watching what happened, the way in which the very same people who rejected it all wanted to be a part of it just one week later, made me know how foolish it would be to imbue their judgment with anything other than commercial consideration of it. Like, “Oh, right now these people don’t think it’s commercially viable.” That’s it. That’s all I can take from that rejection unless there’s something specific that somebody says …

Brian Koppelman:

You know how it is. It will hit off of you in a certain way if it has validity separate from the position that they have in the world.

Debbie Millman:

Absolutely.

Brian Koppelman:

Sometimes that’s more maddening because when you know that they’re right, it’s painful. That’s when it’s painful. If a rejection is for a specific reason and maybe it’s the thing you knew secretly you hadn’t yet fixed, you hadn’t quite nailed it, then okay, great. They caught me. I’ve got to go back and work.

Brian Koppelman:

Most of the time, that’s not the case because my creative partner David and I, we workshop stuff before we present it to the world. We also have our friends who do what we do read it or watch it so that we’re pretty aware of where the traps are before we’re engaging with the world.

Debbie Millman:

Brian, why did you go to law school?

Brian Koppelman:

Social justice reasons originally. I’d read Morris Dee’s book A Season for Justice. Morris Dee started the Southern Poverty Law Center. I read his book and he talked about having some success as a young person and then realizing he had a debt to society and he basically bankrupted the Klan. He put together the lawsuit that functionally bankrupted them nationally. It was an incredible thing.

Brian Koppelman:

That’s what originally triggered me. That and the deeper thing was, I was still running from becoming the person who did the work, the artist.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, being in the music business and shepherding artists and all that stuff was great, but it wasn’t really that satisfying. At law school, as I would write stuff, I realized I liked doing that. There was a reason to do it because I had to for law school, but I quickly realized I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I knew I didn’t want to spend my life doing that.

Debbie Millman:

I read that you were really impacted by how the Cohen Brothers and Spike Lee captured a new kind of language, what you referred to as both spoken and visual. Years later, when you saw Pulp Fiction, opening night was to you the way people talk about seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, that’s completely true.

Debbie Millman:

So, talk about that, that moment-

Brian Koppelman:

Well, that was …

Debbie Millman:

… another one of those moments for you.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, I was in college … Well, Spike Lee, his movie, She’s Gotta Have It, and the Cohen Brothers, Raising Arizona, came out within a few months of one another and I remember going to see She’s Gotta Have It, I’d never heard of Spike because it was his first movie.

Debbie Millman:

That movie destroyed.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah. I couldn’t handle it. First of all, it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life and then also, it mattered so much.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Brian Koppelman:

The visual style and the sense of humor of it and what it was about killed me. I went back three nights in a row. Each night I brought more friends to see the film and I memorized it. Then, soon thereafter I went to see Raising Arizona and did the same thing.

Brian Koppelman:

That planted a seed. I didn’t do this work for 11 years after that, but till we wrote our first movie. That’s when I realized there’s this language in both the visual and a verbal language and people can use language in film in a very specific way. Yes, in 94 when I saw Pulp Fiction, the world exploded for me.

Debbie Millman:

The first movie you wrote is a film called Rounders, which you wrote with your writing partner David Levien. You first met David back on Long Island when you were 14. You’ve been best friends ever since and I read that when you were first doing press for Rounders, you got so bored with the same questions you were being asked over and over about how you met, you started to make up exaggerated stories.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, I don’t even remember them, but we did. We made up a lot of stories.

Debbie Millman:

So, it’s really hard to find the origin story, the actual, true origin story because of all the made up ones.

Brian Koppelman:

No, we didn’t meet on Long Island. We met on a bus tour of the America West. That’s actually how we met.

Debbie Millman:

At JFK? Did you really meet at JFK-

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, that’s really where we met.

Debbie Millman:

… at the airport?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Was it one of those moments where, boom, we’re best friend forever?

Brian Koppelman:

We became best friends the first day or second day that we met. Yeah, we did. We bonded right away somehow. He was 14. I had just turned 16. We were the only kids who read on that thing. We both had books and I, in a really goofy way, I walked around with a valise full of cassette tapes.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Brian Koppelman:

So, I was like really nerdy and geeky.

Debbie Millman:

I did that later in life with CD cases.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah. I walked around … Basically, I really wanted an iPhone or iPod then. They didn’t have it, so I had to have my own. I would walk around with 60 or 80 cassette tapes all the time. Somehow, Dave was like, “Oh, yeah. That’s the dude I want to be friends with.”

Debbie Millman:

You stated that the key to a good collaboration is to be grateful for what the other person brings to the collaboration.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

How do you write with David? How do you write with a partner?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, it shifted over the years and the way we basically work now is we outline together. So, we will go through the whole story together and then we write the scenes separately. We break the whole thing down into scenes together in a room. Here’s the way the story’s going to lay out and then he’ll take half of it, I’ll take half of it and we go away. We have a master document and we’ll submit those scenes as we write them to the master document and then one of us will go through it first and do a polish. Then, the other one will go through it. We just switch off.

Debbie Millman:

How do you come up with the original idea? How did you come up with the idea, “Let’s do a gambling movie where one guy’s got out of the business then a friend comes out of jail and …” How does that happen?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, that one happened because I … Never in my life had I smoked a cigarette and I hated cigarettes and I caught myself in my office late at night eating a cheeseburger and smoking. I was miserable. I realized what I was miserable about is Amy and I had had our first child and I wanted to be the kind of person who would say to his kids, “Go chase your dreams. Be anything you want.” I saw that I wasn’t doing that and that I’d be a hypocrite.

Brian Koppelman:

Dave was tending bar across town from where I was and I went and I said, “Look, man. I have to figure out how to do this. I really want to write a screenplay.” He’d been writing and tending bar and he said, “Well, we’ll write a screenplay together and then you’ll learn how to do it and we’ll really do it.” We started talking about what themes interested us and we had this idea of a kind of friendship between two people.

Brian Koppelman:

We had a couple of scenes like there’s a scene in Rounders when one guy is hiding out in a gym and the other guy goes and finds him in the middle of the night. We had that scene really early on, but we didn’t know what they were going to be exactly. Then, one night I walk into a poker club and as soon as I walked in and heard the people talking and looked around … It was an illegal poker club in Manhattan on 24th Street. I called him in the middle of the night and I said, “Dude, we’re going to make a poker movie.” And, he said, “Yeah. I get it.” Then, he came the next night to the club and then we knew where these guys were going to live.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve written or directed or produced a number of poker-oriented or casino-oriented films: Runner Runner, Rounders, Oceans Thirteen. You also created the TV show tilt, which was a series set against the backdrop of a fictional World Championship of Poker tournament. You were also cast in a bit part as a card player in Tony Gilroy’s amazing film, Michael Clayton.

Brian Koppelman:

Hey, that’s no bit part.

Debbie Millman:

A part.

Brian Koppelman:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

A part.

Brian Koppelman:

Thank you very much.

Debbie Millman:

What is it you like so much about gambling?

Brian Koppelman:

It’s not gambling, it’s poker that’s fascinating to me. Gambling, although I’ve written about all sorts of gambling and know about it, what I’m really fascinated by, the thing that really continues to be almost an obsession to me, is professional poker players. It’s such an incredibly difficult thing to be. To believe that you can outsmart everybody else at the table, that you have the guts to make the call at the moment when you have a very slim edge, that you can read when the other person’s lying or when they’re telling the truth, they’re like modern-day gunslingers to me and they always have been.

Brian Koppelman:

It’s another life. If I had another shot, it’s another thing I would do. I’m just not quite a good enough card player, but the world of poker has never stopped being something that I love.

Debbie Millman:

Had do you manage your tells?

Brian Koppelman:

Right?

Debbie Millman:

You’re not going to tell us?

Brian Koppelman:

No, it’s hard. Yeah. No, it’s hard.

Debbie Millman:

You’re also very involved in meditation.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

That is a big part of your life.

Brian Koppelman:

Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Do you find that mediation and this inner calibration necessary for playing poker well have something in common?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, awareness. One of the ways in which people manage tells, I guess, is that instead of making it about you, you make it about the other players. So, you’re living in a posture of curiosity and fascination. What’s going on with them? What’s happening over here? Instead of being obsessed with my own state, I’m looking and noticing.

Brian Koppelman:

Certainly, that stuff ties in some way. Meditation wasn’t in no way driven by a desire to be better at playing cards.

Debbie Millman:

Just better at life, right?

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah. I practice transcendental meditation, which is silent mantra meditation. It is a way to gain some calmness and some stillness and a bit of peace and has the practical effect of, for me, reducing physical manifestations of anxiety by a really big amount. The same amount that those symptoms would be reduced by taking Lexapro or something.

Debbie Millman:

There’s a lot of intense emotionality in your movies and in your TV shows. In a podcast with Seth Godin, you talk about how movie executives take comfort in decisions on which they can’t get fired.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

But, most of your films have some element of risk-taking, chance-making, gambling, and I don’t mean gambling, I mean it rhetorically, sort of life gambling. Your screenplays aren’t cliches. There isn’t always a predictably happy ending, and I’m thinking of Solitary Man for example. Yet, you’ve managed to have a career in this industry for decades now. How do you manage this risk-adverse, try not to take gambles tenants of the movie business?

Brian Koppelman:

I’ve tried to set up my life in a way that I could take risks so that Amy and I thought a lot about the way in which we wanted to live. When there were years where I made a lot of money in Hollywood by being a screenwriter, I didn’t spend it all, which allowed me to go take the risks of making a movie like Solitary Man. There certainly have been years when it’s been close to the line where we’re living out of savings and we’re looking at each other and not sure ’cause I’m-

Debbie Millman:

She’s a novelist.

Brian Koppelman:

She’s a novelist and Dave and I are making an independent film. When I made the decision with Amy that this was the life I was going to chase, we were really aware because I wasn’t … I was 30 and I had a career and we were really aware that we were taking a chance together that this could work. We were aware of that choice we were making which was to live as writers and filmmakers. I always wanted the ability to turn down Hollywood jobs that I didn’t want to take.

Brian Koppelman:

Even when I talk about knowing I had to be a writer or not wanting to take those jobs, for me, those weren’t effete notions. The fuller thought was that I realized I was a blocked person, a blocked writer, and that thing of me sitting, smoking, and eating a cheeseburger late at night in this office is that I realized I would become toxic and that something would die in me and that if I allowed that to happen, that toxicity would spread to those that I loved.

Brian Koppelman:

That was really the thought because when something dies, it becomes toxic and it spreads. I didn’t want to become toxic. I’ve always had an awareness that if I’m not leading from a place of curiosity and fascination, I become sad and angry and miserable and then I could be that way to the people that I love. That instead, if I’m leading from those places and I feel like … Even if that means I make a movie like Solitary Man that, while incredibly well-reviewed and I get letters about it all the time, wasn’t a big commercial hit, but that gave me so much more joy than doing some rewrite on some big movie because I was making something that I cared deeply about making so that I had this sense every day of making progress and moving forward and becoming closer to a perfected form of myself. We never get there, but some closer version of that.

Brian Koppelman:

I don’t even think about risk. I don’t process risk in the way you’re talking about. I really think of all this stuff as, “What’s the next thing I want to do? Boy, this seems hard to do. How do I do it?”

Debbie Millman:

So, you don’t ever feel that your inner self isn’t capable or that you might not be … It just doesn’t occur to you, you just-

Brian Koppelman:

It did a long time ago. It doesn’t anymore.

Debbie Millman:

Is it because of the repetitive success that you’ve had?

Brian Koppelman:

I think Morning Pages. Really because of Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages.

Debbie Millman:

Really?

Brian Koppelman:

That’s the thing that I then did when Dave was like, “Okay, we’ll write this thing together.”

Debbie Millman:

So, you just wrote every day.

Brian Koppelman:

I started doing Morning Pages the way she talks about it, three long-hand pages, free-form, not censoring yourself, not looking back and reading those pages. In doing that, I started to realize who I wanted to be and who I needed to be and how to get there.

Brian Koppelman:

It’s not that I never have self-doubt. Of course, I have self-doubt. We all have self-doubt. It goes back to that rejection thing. In the instant, you feel all of it. You feel rejected and worthless and like a failure. Some people can live in that state for six months. I live in that state for six minutes, maybe for two days. I learned how to put in place for myself a protocol, a routine so that I don’t get that way. I do Morning Pages. I meditate. I take long walks. I go somewhere and I start writing.

Brian Koppelman:

There have been real low points. In 2013, Dave and I wrote a movie that was a disaster, Runner Runner. We were going to be the showrunners for Vinyl. It was called Rock and Roll then. We never wrote anything. There was some political thing that happened at HBO and we got fired. In the same three weeks, we had this huge bomb of a movie and we were fired and I really did feel miserable and I felt like I wasn’t sure where a path was open. I allowed myself to feel like, “This is fucked and unfair.”

Brian Koppelman:

Soon thereafter, I started making these Vines. We’re in the middle of this making this series of Vines about why and how to do this kind of work. Dave and I along with Andrew Ross Sorkin, we started writing on spec Billions. Each day that I would write, I became stronger so that by the time we were halfway through Billions, I had cast off that rejection completely and I was only immersed in this work and in what was next. That’s it.

Brian Koppelman:

Along with that is I never have a day that I’m not with my family unless I’m traveling. I spend mornings with them and I always take … My daughter lets me still, even though she’s 17, walk her to school. I’m still spending time with my family and so if I’m doing that, if I’m with them and I’m doing that work, I’ve won.

Debbie Millman:

I think sometimes when people are so afraid of feeling fear or rejection or facing risk, they think that that feeling is going to last forever. What I find is that if you do experience it and you allow yourself to feel it, it will pass like a lot of other things do like hunger, like being tired, like any number of things once you process them.

Brian Koppelman:

Look, it is a bad … It’s a terrible feeling. I’m not making short shrift of it.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I know.

Brian Koppelman:

I’m not free of anxiety and I’m not free of fear and I’m not free of hating rejection. I’ve just learned to manage it and in managing it, you gain power over it.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk about power. Let’s talk about Billions.

Brian Koppelman:

Sure.

Debbie Millman:

Congratulations on an amazing, amazing show, Brian.

Brian Koppelman:

Oh, thanks.

Debbie Millman:

For those that might not have seen the show, it is a drama on Showtime starring Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis. You write it with your partner David Levien. Can you describe this series for our listeners?

Brian Koppelman:

Sure and also, Dave and I have a writing staff who work with us also and how are great and contribute to the show mightily.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, Billions is a show set in the world of high finance and the federal prosecutorial world. It’s about Bobby Axelrod, who’s a hedge fund titan, and Chuck Rhoades, who is the United States attorney for the Southern District and about Wendy Rhoades played by Maggie Siff, who is a performance coach in the hedge fund world and also happens to be married to Chuck Rhoades, the U.S. attorney. It’s a thriller in a way, but it also offers a forensic look at money, power, and influence in New York right now.

Debbie Millman:

The first episode of Billions contains the best opening and closing scenes of any show I have ever seen, Brian.

Brian Koppelman:

Oh, thanks.

Debbie Millman:

For anyone that hasn’t seen the show yet, please be aware that minor spoilers will be coming. The premiere episode of Billions begins with Chuck Rhoades, the U.S. General Attorney being serviced by a dominatrix who puts a cigarette out on his chest and then urinates on the burn. We find out shortly thereafter that Chuck is the U.S. General Attorney. Where did this idea come from?

Brian Koppelman:

The idea for that originally came from a movie that Dave and I made with Steven Soderbergh called the Girlfriend Experience.

Debbie Millman:

Yes.

Brian Koppelman:

In researching that movie, we spent a good amount of time with really high-priced escorts. It’s an amazing thing if you’re a writer. The moment you open a laptop, people will, especially if you’re writing for the movies, will tell you everything about their lives. So, we would meet these women. They would come to Steven’s office, we’d open our laptops and say, “Tell us the most interesting, strangest stories. Tell us about your life.” They would tell us these incredible stories.

Brian Koppelman:

We’d get to the end of almost every interview and we’d say, “Okay, is that it?” And, they’d say, “You know, I’ve got to tell you one other thing.” We’d say, “What?” To a woman, they said the most powerful man I see wants me to peg him. The first time you hear it you go, “What? What do you mean?” They go, “No, no. The guy who I see who runs a business and has a thousand employees, he wants to be dominated. He wants a cigarette put out. He wants to be peed on. He wants to be pegged. He wants to be dressed up and read to like a child.”

Brian Koppelman:

You hear it once and you just think, “Oh. Well, that’s an interesting anecdote.” You hear it 25 times and you realize something about a certain type of person.

Debbie Millman:

What do you realize?

Brian Koppelman:

It’s about control and the release of control. The need to not be in control. The need to, after exerting that kind of power and influence, to surrender and about a lot of other stuff clearly also.

Brian Koppelman:

But, we’d remembered that detail and then when we were thinking about these kinds of prosecutors, many of them who’d get in various scandals, we thought we could play with the idea of scandal because the other spoiler piece is it turns out that dominatrix isn’t a dominatrix. It’s his wife. You find that out at the end of the episode. In fact, we were interested in the accommodations people in a long-term marriage make for and to one another and about what if we showed a real marriage with people really engaging sexually with one another in a way that just isn’t what you think of as a husband and wife on television.

Brian Koppelman:

We knew we could play with these ideas. It just created something that would tell you a lot about these characters in a shorthand. We were really happy to be able to deploy it there. Then, the fact that we wrote the script on spec so we didn’t have a deal when we wrote it meant that whoever was going to buy it, they were going to sign off on that right from the beginning and let us do what we wanted to do, which was have their supposed masculine lead character peed on at the beginning of the show.

Debbie Millman:

There’s this one scene when Chuck goes to the BDSM club.

Brian Koppelman:

When he does it when he’s out of town or when he does it when he’s in town and the-

Debbie Millman:

When he does it when the person at the club says, “Does your wife know?”

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, The 11th episode of the first season. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Which is just an amazing moment when you realize that this engagement that the husband and wife have, that Wendy and Chuck have, it has specific rules. This third person that they go to understands the dynamic between them. There’s a depth to that writing and that relationship that is …

Brian Koppelman:

Well, thanks.

Debbie Millman:

I’ve never seen in two characters on TV.

Brian Koppelman:

It’s been incredibly rewarding. We’ve gotten letters from doms who’ve said, “Thank you for showing that our lifestyle isn’t some abhorrent thing. That we’re people and we can have loving, caring, real relationships.” Lots of people in the lifestyle have written and thanked us for it, which is great.

Debbie Millman:

That is incredible.

Brian Koppelman:

Not something I anticipated, but great to get that response from people.

Debbie Millman:

Billions was the first thing I thought of when the supposedly fake CIA dossier came out detailing Trump’s alleged interaction with the urinating Russian prostitutes.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah, a lot of people tweeted about that. Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

What do you think about the dossier?

Brian Koppelman:

Do I think that Russia has kompromat? Yes.

Debbie Millman:

Let’s talk a little bit about the dialogue in Billions. It’s very rat-a-tat-tat. My favorite line is I think a lot of people’s favorite lines when Bobby asks Paul Giamatti’s character, “What’s the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you?” How do you come up with lines like that? Is it instant? Is it hard work? Is it both?

Brian Koppelman:

Dave and I have spent-

Debbie Millman:

How does that pop out?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, we love this stuff. Explaining how dialogue is written is probably the hardest thing. There’s a tremendous amount of rigor in deciding what to keep and what not to keep and in re-writing. The writing part, if we’ve done the work of figuring out what the scenes are supposed to be, what the episode is supposed to be, and we go off and write the scenes, that’s the joy part of it. That’s what makes us laugh. I’m constantly trying to make Dave laugh and he’s trying to make me laugh.

Debbie Millman:

You also write as if you know the universality of people. In a short story, you write titled Wednesday is Victors, a character is described as follows: “Alec makes people feel good when they’re doing something bad together. Makes them believe they are conspirators in a great, joyful ruse, like they are the only honest ones in a game everyone else is too ashamed to admit they are playing, so everyone likes Alec.”

Debbie Millman:

It made me think that almost all of your unlikeable characters are actually quite likable even Michael Douglas’ character in Solitary Man. You’re hating him, but you’re kind of sort of rooting for him.

Brian Koppelman:

Well, that’s Michael’s incredible gift as an actor is that Michael can engage in any behavior and, for some reason, you go with him.

Debbie Millman:

Well, yes and the dialogue and his direction, it’s quite astonishing.

Brian Koppelman:

Well, thanks. Yeah, that’s probably my favorite movie of ours. When you’re writing a character, you become fascinated by the way that they think and you-

Debbie Millman:

Bobby Axelrod is an ass, but I love him.

Brian Koppelman:

See, I love Bobby Axelrod. I know that he does terrible things, but I understand what he thinks he’s doing, why he thinks he doing what he’s doing.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, but Trump’s an awful person and there’s nothing that we can find likable.

Brian Koppelman:

Well, that’s totally different. Trump has none of the charm of Bobby Axelrod.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, yeah. Damian Lewis, if you look at what he did in Homeland, and now what he’s doing in Billions, what a remarkable actor.

Brian Koppelman:

He’s an incredible actor. Incredible. He and Giamatti and Maggie Siff and Malin Akerman, we’re just blessed with this cast who can take our words and really, really fly with those words, but also, I think our characters always have a sense of humor. That’s really what you’re talking about and can make fun of themselves.

Brian Koppelman:

Trump never makes fun of himself. The only times that he tries to be funny are when he’s putting somebody else down. Our characters see the world the way a certain kind of comedian sees the world. They see the sadness in the world or they see what’s fucked up in the world.

Debbie Millman:

The ethos, yeah.

Brian Koppelman:

… so, that even Bobby Axelrod understands the absurdity with a capital A of his situation. That is a big part of it is that these … Even Michael Douglas in Solitary Man, he makes you laugh right from the beginning of being with him.

Brian Koppelman:

When you’re laughing along with someone, endorphins fire and they’ve made your endorphins fire and so you are bonded with them. None of that is something that I think about beforehand. I’m just writing these characters, but as I write them and as Dave writes them, they express themselves. If you look at Diner and She’s Gotta Have It and Raising Arizona and Pulp Fiction, those movies have the same thing I’m talking about. They do. Those characters do that.

Brian Koppelman:

Mars Blackmon’s a pretty shitty person in that movie, but you love him.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, you’re still rooting for him.

Brian Koppelman:

You’re rooting for him the whole time because he’s funny and charming.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, that’s the thing about Billions, you’re rooting for all of them.

Brian Koppelman:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

And, you get really tense because you don’t know where you need to-

Brian Koppelman:

Thematically what we were and are incredibly interested in, we’re really interested in why, as a culture, we’ve decided that ambition and charm equal likability. What is it about people like Bobby Axelrod that makes them appear heroic to people? Because, they’re not heroic to us.

Debbie Millman:

You’ve said that in Billions you’re learning the way people in finance self-mythologize. What do you mean by that?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, I honestly don’t think you need to look anywhere but on television to understand, at the news to understand that. Everyone up on any public stage has learned how to tell their story and frame their narrative make up the myth of who they are. Trump-

Debbie Millman:

So, self-branding.

Brian Koppelman:

Well, that Trump can stand … Sure. That Trump can stand there and tell a rags to riches story about himself and reframe this narrative, or frame the narrative, the myth that he’s there for the little guy. You don’t have to be a Democrat like we are to understand that the notion that he’s there for the little guy is ridiculous, but he stood up there and gave birth to this myth of himself and people bought into it.

Debbie Millman:

You are using your Twitter feed, which is how we met, so to speak … You share highly political, very critical view of the president-elect. What made you decide to use Twitter in this way?

Brian Koppelman:

I don’t understand being on social media in any way other than openly and honestly. I’m not interested in using Twitter as a piece of branding for myself. When I started on Twitter I had no following and I wasn’t famous. I just decided to talk about whatever I was interested in. Over time, through this stuff, I now have a group of people who engage in this conversation with me. I think a lot of that, sure, some of that has to do with the work that I do or the podcast I host or the show, but a lot of that has to do with the way that I talk on the platform. It’s a conversation I want to engage in. It’s a conversation, I think, we have to engage in. We have a duty to engage in it.

Brian Koppelman:

In the very beginning, I probably worried about losing people.

Debbie Millman:

Did you find that you did?

Brian Koppelman:

I decided not to look. I certainly do see that I’ve continued to have people who want to engage with me on there.

Debbie Millman:

Do you get a lot of blowback from people?

Brian Koppelman:

Sometimes. My kids are very accomplished and I like to share their work on Twitter. So, sometimes after it’s a particular political thing, I’ll unpin, if I’ve pinned a piece that one of them wrote somewhere, particularly my daughter, I’ll unpin it so people don’t go after her. If someone calls me a Jew cocksucker, what does that do to me? Nothing. Who gives a shit?

Brian Koppelman:

The blowback doesn’t upset me. Who cares? If someone comes at me with a great argument, I’m really happy to engage in that conversation. That’s really fun and maybe I’ll learn something open, but the blowback tends to be white supremacists going like, “Fuck you, Jew.” What am I going to say? Actually, I was raised Jewish, but I’m an atheist. You know what I mean? So, I wouldn’t if I were you. What can you do? You can’t do anything with that. Move on.

Debbie Millman:

Right. You have your own podcast. It’s called The Moment with Brian Koppelman and it focuses on key moments that people have in their careers. What made you decide to start a podcast?

Brian Koppelman:

In doing this series of Vines that I did where I talked about creativity and giving yourself permission to do this kind of work. During that time I was listening to a lot of podcasts, particularly listening to Maron and Elvis Mitchell and Carolla a lot. I would sometimes be listening to Marc and wish he asked a different question or listening to Elvis and wishing the show was twice as long ’cause Elvis asks all the right questions.

Brian Koppelman:

Then, I went on a few podcasts and when I did I would get tons of feedback from people asking me to do it again, do more of it. I just decided, “Fuck it. I’m going to do this and see what happens.” Realized that I had this organizing principle I wanted to chase which was about inflection points, what I call inflection points in people’s lives, moments of real highs or real lows when they had to decide how to move forward. Even in great success, it’s always very hard to then figure out what the next steps are. My podcast is the show I wish I had when I was 25 because I could have used those lessons that people come on and give me and taken them and maybe I would have gotten where I got to sooner.

Brian Koppelman:

I was shaken in the last few months in the shadow of Trump’s nomination, I started wondering whether these kinds of conversations mattered anymore. I took a two-month hiatus and then decided I got my friend James Altucher who’s a great podcast host and writer to come and do an episode with me. We talked about whether or not to do this kind of thing at the end of which I decided I probably should and I asked people to tell me what they thought. The feedback really convinced me to keep doing it.

Debbie Millman:

What made you question whether or not it was a valuable contribution?

Brian Koppelman:

Well, I really do think the house is on fire. Almost like any time spent talking about anything but how to resist civil liberties disappearing … When you talk about the direction of my career in life that thing that happened to me when I was 19 and I was organizing the boycott, I can’t ignore that that thread has run through a lot of my life. Figuring out the right way to life and the fair way to live and being accountable to other human beings. I do think that all the civil liberties that all of us have, really tried to secure for such a long time, are close to disappearing.

Brian Koppelman:

I don’t want to be an alarmist and yes, we have a governmental order set up to not allow that to happen, but I don’t see a lot of resistance in the House and Senate. He’s going to name at least one Supreme Court justice and probably two. So, I decided I’m going to use my voice in whatever way that I can and try to read and think and figure all this stuff out.

Brian Koppelman:

I do think that the left needs a voice to counter O’Reilly on the right. I don’t think that we have anybody really who’s able to talk to most Americans in a plain, direct way. I think even words like civil liberties, people tune out and we need to use words like freedom. The right has claimed all those words and nobody on our side uses them. I look at Bill Maher and John Oliver who are both great, but to me, their preaching to the choir and Maher’s full of snark and Oliver’s funny and on HBO, which is a pay service that most people who are Trump voters don’t have. Keith Olbermann’s not on television anymore.

Debbie Millman:

Which is tragic.

Brian Koppelman:

It is and MSNBC, you can’t find a bigger Rachel Maddow/Chris Hayes fan than I am, but they’re geeks speaking to other geeks.

Debbie Millman:

Right, we need Keith back.

Brian Koppelman:

We need somebody to get up there and be able to talk really plainly about this stuff and I’m certainly prepared to do some of that too.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, I hope you do, Brian. I really hope you do.

Debbie Millman:

Brian, thank you so much for being on Design Matters today.

Brian Koppelman:

Thanks for having me. This is really fun.

Debbie Millman:

To learn more about Brian Koppelman, follow him on Twitter @briankoppelman. Listen to his wonderful podcast, The Moment With Brian Koppelman and make sure you catch the premiere of season two of Billions on Showtime on February 19th.

Debbie Millman:

This is the 12th year I’ve been doing Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Speaker 1:

Design Matters with Debbie Millman is recorded at the Masters in Branding Studio at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It is produced by Curtis Fox productions with technical assistance by Mark Dudlik. The show is published exclusively by designobserver.com. You can subscribe to this free podcast in the iTunes store.

The post Best of Design Matters: Brian Koppelman appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Debbie Millman:

Yes, I know Ethan Hawke is a famous actor and hardly needs an introduction. He’s starred in more than 80 movies, many of which have made their mark in the zeitgeist. You’ve likely seen him in everything from Dead Poets Society and Reality Bites to the Before trilogy and Boyhood. Ethan Hawke is also a writer. In fact, in high school, he wanted to be a writer before becoming interested in acting. Over his nearly four-decade career, he’s managed to do both, and then some. Today I’m going to talk with him about his latest novel, A Bright Ray of Darkness, and his bravura performance as John Brown in the showtime series “The Good Lord Bird.” Ethan Hawke, welcome to Design Matters.

Ethan Hawke:

Well thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Debbie Millman:

Ethan, is it true that when you were growing up you had fantasies of becoming a merchant marine?

Ethan Hawke:

That is very true. Well, I was a big Jack London fan. I had a kid who lived down the street from me. He was a grade older than I was, Nick, and he liked Jack London. He was really cool. When you’re 16, a 17-year-old just feels like he’s got the world by the scruff of the neck. He went off to be a merchant marine and live off his Jack London fantasies. I have no idea what happened to him. But we used to read books together and talk about him, and I thought he was a … I wanted to be just like him. But I also want to be just like Jack London. So I thought that might be a great avenue to chase down an interesting life, is to disappear into the seas and come back somebody interesting, because I thought I was pretty boring as I was.

Debbie Millman:

Really? Why is that?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I think I was pretty boring. I mean, I think most young people struggle with a sense of who they are and what they want to be. You look around you and some things seem interesting, but most paths feel impossible to walk down. I think the road of adventure loomed large in my head. I longed to been born in another time period when the world felt wilder, I guess, but probably every generation feels that way.

Debbie Millman:

Your parents met in high school, Ethan. Your mom was 17 when she had you. But they divorced when you were 4 years old. When asked in an interview if their divorce scarred you, you stated, “Scarred puts a judgment on it,” and then go on to declare that you were formed by it, and made by it. I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I mean, that’s called the unity of opposites, isn’t it? It is a good thing and it is a bad thing. I find children long to … they long, long, long in their heart and soul and every stitch of their body longs to believe that their parents love each other and that they were born for a reason, and that they were born in love. Most of us long for that. The advantage of being raised from the point of divorce, from that vantage point, is that you see the world as more complicated a little earlier and you get your heart broken a little earlier. That break has an opportunity to invite some wisdom into your life, or at least some experience, right? I think that it can make you stronger. You know that poem “Stronger in the Broken Places”? It wakes you up to the idea that no one has the perfect life and that you were born in love and it doesn’t matter what happened to the band after they made your music. Your music was born out of something beautiful.

Debbie Millman:

After the divorce, you alternated between living on the East Coast with your mother and visiting your dad back in Texas. I read that this caused you to alternate between personalities. In what way?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I bet you everybody who came from going to mom’s house, going to dad’s house, they know exactly what I’m talking about.

Debbie Millman:

Oh, yeah. My parents got divorced when I was 8, so I get it.

Ethan Hawke:

There’s a personality you have that you think makes your mother like you better and there’s a personality you have that you think makes your father like you better. For a long time, I thought that meant that I was a liar. That I wasn’t showing the real me. Who’s the real me? Slowly, as you get older, you realize that these people, they’re all me. I love my mother and I love my father, and I want them to see the best of me. It doesn’t make me a liar. But I do think it taught me at a young age how malleable my personality was. If my personality was malleable, probably everyone’s is, and it might have been a very good entry point for the life of a performer.

Debbie Millman:

Do you think that that gave you a sense that you were performing for them, your parents?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I know that Marlon Brando would tell you that you’re performing for me right now and I’m performing for you, that what is our authentic self is very mysterious. We want our peers to like us. We want to be somebody respected. We want people to think positive things about us and all those things, and we manipulate ourselves and we do a little bit of … you perform for grandma. “Yes, ma’am. This apple pie is delicious, grandma. You’re the best, grandma.” Then you walk into your buddy’s house and you say, “Hey, who’s got a joint?” I mean, it doesn’t mean you’re the worst person in the world. It means you’re bigger than one thing. That’s what I think, anyway. Performance, like the thing about divorce, we use all these words. Performance makes it sound like you’re not being true. I am being true when I talk to my grandmother. That is who I want to be for her, and does that make sense?

Debbie Millman:

Oh, absolutely. I read that while you were in high school it gave you the opportunity to become an expert at fitting in. I was really fascinated by that because as also a child of divorce, I also had that ability, that range of wanting to be friends with lots of different groups. I understand that you were on the school football team, in the church youth group, you had a range of friends that included graphic novel reading geeks, theater nerds, punk rock girls, deadheads. How were you able to slip in and out of so many personas at that time? Because I do sense that it really was authentic in the same way that I felt that as I was slipping in and out, I was still being aspects of me too.

Ethan Hawke:

I think you can be authentic with different types of people. I mean, the positive, maybe without breaking my arm patting myself on the back, is that I’m not inherently judgmental. I’m not convinced that I’m the moral authority on anything. So I don’t really have a belief that somebody’s got it right and somebody’s got it wrong. I think because I moved around a lot, I was really hungry for friendship, and I would accept it wherever it came. I think that’s a quality I like. I’ve tried to hold on
to that quality. It’s a quality that when I see it in others, I like it.

Ethan Hawke:

One of my best friends is Richard Linklater. We’ve spent a lot of time together. He’s a great filmmaker. One of the things that makes him a great filmmaker is just a genuine love of people. If you watch Dazed and Confused, you see he has love for every type of category you want to put somebody in. He sees people with compassionate eyes, as opposed to—there’s a lot of movies and films out there that are always judging. He’s a good guy, he’s a bad guy, she’s a liar, he’s the enemy. We’re all caught in this huge spiderweb trying to make sense out of where we were born and who was our grandma and what our aptitude is for. I’ve just never felt too judgmental, and that helped me as a kid.

Debbie Millman:

From what I understand, you wanted to be an actor since you were 12, after your mother enrolled you in an after-school program and you were cast in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Was that really when your first seeds of wanting to perform were cast?

Ethan Hawke:

I think a lot of young people want to feel like they matter, like they’re special, like they’re interesting, like somebody cares about them. One of the first ways you could do that is to jump in front of the class and dance or sing or play a song or be great at sports or some way to set yourself apart. I think that I don’t believe that my initial interest in acting came from a desire to express myself for some real artistic impulse. I think it came from a simple desire to be noticed, to be liked. I think that’s a very dangerous fire to play with. But yeah, I went to an acting class. I really did love it. I was pretty good at it. From my first class, I think we had a guest teacher come into the … it was at the Paul Robeson Center for Performing Arts, and this guest teacher came from McCarter theater and he led a little improv class.

Ethan Hawke:

I remember vividly in the parking lot there and he asked me will I be interested in playing [inaudible] page. I was like, “Well, do I have any lines?” He said, “You have two lines.” I said, “Then, heck yeah.” So I got to put on armor and be a little page to a knight, his little squire, and I had a couple … I had to sneeze, which was very hard to do. The page sneezes and they know the winds changed. I took that sneezing exercise very hard. But so anyway, my point is, my first acting class I got my first part. My life has been … sometimes I say acting chose me. It guided me. I felt caught in a river almost. Early in my career with Dead Poets Society, that movie could have been a bomb, and two weeks later, I’d been on a boat chasing my friend Nick, emulating Jack London.

Debbie Millman:

You got your first part after your first big audition for Joe Dante’s science fiction film Explorers. You beat out 3,000 other actors. You co-starred with River Phoenix, and though it didn’t do well, at the time you thought God had found you.

Ethan Hawke:

I did feel like that. You kids, you feel like you’re lost in this sea of prepubescent everybody … I felt the thing I was hunting for, somebody will notice me. I’m here, I’m raising my hand—pick me, pick me—and I felt like I got picked.

Debbie Millman:

What was it like to have such an epic disappointment at 13 when the movie didn’t pan out the way you thought it was going to?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, that’s why being a kid is so hard. You have no sense of perspective. On my emotional radar, it felt like a helicopter fell from the sky and destroyed my house. I would have dreams of going to see the premiere, and they remade the movie without me. River and another kid would be on there. It was scary to be sucked into the adult world and fail. Because it felt like, well, I guess I can’t do this, this thing that I’m yearning for. Now, ironically, this was one of the greatest blessings. When you talk about the unity of opposites, right? This is one of the greatest blessings of my life. Those tears I shed over that, nothing better could have been happening to me. Because all of a sudden, I wasn’t a child actor. I’m back in high school, being a nerd, trying to do my thing, getting a dose of humility, and learning a more genuine relationship to what the arts is about.

Debbie Millman:

You decided to give acting a second chance as a senior in high school playing Tom Wingfield in your second cousin twice removed, I believe, Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie. What motivated you to try again?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I loved it. It actually happened a little differently than that. I was a senior and the kid who was in The Matchmaker … they were doing the … I was playing soccer that fall, and the lead in The Matchmaker dropped out three days before the performance. And the head of the English program came to me and said, “Would you do this?” I said, “Sure.” I learned the lines … I was the lead of the show, and I learned the lines in a couple hours. I went out there and I had a ball, and I was good at it. I made everybody laugh. I think I was really loose because I didn’t put any thought into it. I couldn’t fail because I was so coming through for the team just by showing up.

Ethan Hawke:

It’s like there’s a great relaxation—no matter what I do, it’s going to go well because otherwise the show wasn’t going to go on. It was a perfect scenario. Once I did that and felt that laughter in the room, I felt that high, well, then I really wanted to do it. It was very uncommon in high school to pick such a small play, as The Glass Menagerie has four characters, and it gave me this great part and they knew I really love that play. I was really into Tennessee Williams as a kid because my family was always telling me that we were related to him, and he’s brilliant.

Debbie Millman:

After high school, you attended Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, but you hated it. How come?

Ethan Hawke:

Yes. I had really wanted my life to begin when high school ended. The joke about the Jack Lemmon thing was very real to me. I didn’t want to be a kid anymore. The thing about being a senior in high school versus being a freshman in college is you just go back to square one. You’re just a kid again and everybody’s telling you what to do. I had a couple strange experiences that are too boring to get into. But just with fights and different things. I wasn’t in the mental headspace to learn, and I heard about these auditions because of my experience with the Explorers. They were doing big casting calls for this movie Dead Poets Society.

Ethan Hawke:

I knew there were seven parts for young kids, and so I took the train back to New York and auditioned for this movie, because I just had the thought that, well, if I can’t get one of these seven parts …This is the way a 17-year-old thinks. If I don’t get one of these parts, then I’m not meant to be an actor. Well, that’s a dumb thing to say. But in this case, I got one of
them. I was able to have an adventure. I mean, going down there and meeting Robin Williams and having this part and all this responsibility and working with genuine artists, I mean, this was not Peter Weir at that time, for people who are cinema fans. Peter Weir is a master craftsman and I was his pupil. He spoke to us with respect.

Ethan Hawke:

I mean, we were being assigned Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman and Emerson, running little acting workshops and being given improvs, and who’s in our workshop and Robin Williams. I mean, what that’s like for a young person. You can’t unsee that. He’s on set with John Seale, one of the greatest cinematographers, and listening to the way that they talk about light and the frame and the way he listens to music, and we watch movies together. The way he watched movies was different than the way my friends watch movies. Your brain starts to … little particles open up that had never been opened before, and you start to absorb. It was an experience that I don’t think any of us understood how impactful it would be in the mind of a young person.

Debbie Millman:

I want to talk about one of the moments in that movie. Despite it being so long ago, you’ve stated that one of your all-time favorite scenes is the one where Robin Williams inspires you to make up a poem. You said it was basically Robin teaching you the creative act, which is what the scene is about. But he was also teaching you how to act.

Ethan Hawke:

There’s a certain magic that happens in movies sometimes. If you try to put it into words, what’s so beautiful and mysterious about life itself, you just become an idiot by trying to give it vocabulary words that make sense. But when there’s a subconscious to your work and when the subconscious is in line with what the larger metaphor of the movie is about, then you accidentally, through no credit of your own, stumble into something profound. I was struggling with my own confidence and I was struggling with this burning desire to contribute and to have a relationship to poetry and rock and roll and anything that made sense to me when the world didn’t make sense, and so was my character.

Ethan Hawke:

Robin Williams is in the height of his powers. He’s just done Good Morning, Vietnam. He just finished [inaudible]. He’d been doing Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin on Broadway, directed by Mike Nichols. I mean, he was working with the best people in the top of his game, and it was him making me sound my barbaric yawp. It was exactly what … I mean, there was just levels to it, and that’s what the movie’s about. It’s unlocking the creativity of young people. Funny enough for people who are film fans, I don’t know, the steady cam had just been invented. They were really excited about the fact that you could move the camera an interesting way. Peter Weir and John Seale were very excited about this new camera toy, and that maybe we could do this scene in one shot, or what would at least feel like one shot.

Ethan Hawke:

That puts a lot of pressure on the actors because he’s doing these five, seven minutes takes in one shot, and all of a sudden you disappear. You just disappear into the process of making something. All of a sudden, they broke for lunch, and I was like, “What just happened? That was awesome.” I’ll tell you something funny. Robin took me by the shoulder and he said, “And the Oscar goes to Ethan Hawke.” Right? This is who I was back then. I was so angry because I didn’t know if he was kidding. I felt so confused by that. Because he’d been nominated for an Academy Award. That idea seemed like saying, “You’re going to win the Super Bowl,” and it felt like he was teasing me. Because I just had this unbelievable high. I don’t need any prizes. I don’t need this … I wanted to be taken seriously. I think back on it and I go, “Oh, God, I was such an intense 16-year-old. Jesus, get over yourself, kid.” But I remember that’s how complicated and stirred up I felt. I didn’t know how to judge the feelings that were happening inside of me.

Debbie Millman:

So much of that is in your face. I mean, I just recently watched that scene again, and I think that that steady cam, the way it’s going around you, and as you’re both spinning around and as he’s holding you and as you’re finding yourself, it’s almost like giving birth to creativity. It was so powerful.

Ethan Hawke:

That’s the way it felt to me.

Debbie Millman:

Do you think that he was complimenting you, looking back on it?

Ethan Hawke:

He’s having experiences like that five times a week. I mean, I think he loved it. I think what he was saying is, “Wow, that was great.” I mean, I think that’s what he was saying. But he didn’t understand how badly I wanted that compliment. Because then he runs off and he’s at lunch and he’s on a meeting, he’s talking to his agent and I’m still just sitting there waiting for everybody to come back from lunch. He got me my first agent. I think I would have to say that he did. He did mean it well.

Debbie Millman:

In 1991, you took your Dead Poets Society money and you used it for a down payment on the Sanford Meisner Theater on 11th Avenue in New York City. You and Josh Hamilton and Jonathan Mark Sherman founded the Menlo Park Theater Company. What made you decide to do that as opposed to hightailing it to Hollywood?

Ethan Hawke:

Why didn’t I buy a bag of cocaine? I don’t know. Why didn’t I buy a Porsche? I had no interest in anything but a life in the arts. Because of my experience with the Explorers, I was very dubious of the success of Dead Poets Society. I knew how fleeting that could be and I knew that I didn’t go to college, that I wasn’t educated. I knew I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I did have a tremendous amount of energy, and I had 26 grand in my pocket burning a hole. I was trying to start this theater company, and we couldn’t decide what to do and we couldn’t … it seemed like all we ever did was talk about it. I decided I’ll just rent this theater, and we only had the rental for three weeks or 20 days or something like that, so we had to do it.

Debbie Millman:

You also auditioned for Titanic. But I have a feeling if you got that part, then instead of Leonardo DiCaprio, you would have had a very different career. I recently talked to Claire Danes about the same thing. She turned down the part that Kate Winslet ultimately played. Were you upset at the time that you didn’t get the part?

Ethan Hawke:

I knew I wasn’t going to get the part when I went in for a screen test. I just didn’t audition for that. I went in for a screen test and I knew I wasn’t going to get it when I started talking to James Cameron. First of all, let me say that I don’t think I could have possibly handled it any better than DiCaprio did. DiCaprio used that success to launch. I’m one of the few people who really understand how hard it is to work. He has worked in the major leagues for years, working with great people and doing amazing work, and he used that success to launch himself into relationships with major f
ilm art directors. He was not frivolous with his gift at all, and I admire the hell out of him.

Ethan Hawke:

I’ll say the reason I knew I didn’t get the part—you can tell by this interview, right? That I like to talk. They gave me the script and you couldn’t get the script. It was so … they literally came to my hotel with an armed guard who sat and waited while I read the script, right? I walked into that audition room and I broke his script down. I told him, “This is going to be the biggest movie of all time.” I said, “This is Gone With the Wind meets Towering Inferno. This is an unbelievable script.” I started breaking down what the references were. I thought I was so smart. I watched his eyes glaze over. I saw him go, Oh my god, I never want to see this kid again. If he comes on set, he is going to be such a bore.

Ethan Hawke:

My inner voice is saying, “Shut up. Come in character. Have some dice in your pocket. Try to be a bad ass. Sell him on that you really are Jack.” I knew inside I should be shutting up, but I wouldn’t stop talking about. … It’s a best romance novel of all time set in Towering Inferno, right? I just I thought it was brilliant. I love the way it was written. It was a beautifully written script. I mean, it read like a novel. Anyway, I was over before I started. Done, done, done. DiCaprio was a star born.

Debbie Millman:

Ethan, you published your first novel, The Hottest State, in 1996. From what I understand, you were motivated to start writing because of how mercurial an actor’s life could be. Were you afraid at that point that the acting roles were going to dry up?

Ethan Hawke:

I wasn’t afraid. I was sure of it. River had died. I watched all the people who were successful when I was a kid actor have terrible experiences and be like people I met at auditions. There were other people who auditioned for Dead Poets Society, people that went on to have big careers and stuff like that. I watched how all this success was awful for human beings’ development. I come from a family that doesn’t have a lot of respect for society’s idea of “success.” My father is a man of deep faith, and that is his priority. I don’t want to speak for him. But your relationship to whatever is the eternal is really what matters. It wouldn’t matter how successful you were if you weren’t right within, right? I mean, that’s the house I was raised in.

Ethan Hawke:

My mother, she’s given me Wallace Stevens poems, she’s given me Thomas Merton books, and the people around me wanted something better for me than to be on the cover of Teen Beat. But I was very restless. I really enjoyed the buzz of being around creative people and the high of trying to talk about why we’re born and why we have to die, and so I tried to write. Because I thought that the experience would make me grow. What would publishing be like? It was a huge education. My mother has a great line: “Well, how do you want your obituary to read?” People in the moment might think, “What a dummy. He’s publishing a book. Who does he think he is?” But when they read your obituary and they say you wrote a novel, you think, “good for him.” You know what I mean? If you get yourself in the long view of time, then you can deal with the ebb and flow of criticism.

Debbie Millman:

Is it true that your mother read your first draft and stated, “Well, you’re not Chekhov?”

Ethan Hawke:

Yeah, that’s what she said. But my ego was not my problem. It needed to come down a peg. Right? She felt that was her job. I bet if you were around a 24-year-old me, you might want to tell me I’m not Chekhov too.

Debbie Millman:

I read The Hottest State back when it first came out, but I hadn’t seen the movie, which you also starred in and directed. I watched it in prep for the interview. I noticed in the credits Richard Linklater, the director of your Before trilogy, and Boyhood, and Dazed and Confused, and so many other amazing, amazing movies. He was credited as the John Wayne enthusiast in the film.

Ethan Hawke:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There’s a scene [where] he plays a guy who’s trying to chat up a girl at a Williamsburg party. It was a monologue. I’d always wanted to put him in something. It happened to me standing in line at McDonald’s, and this guy was crying. I said to him, “Hey, what happened, man? Are you OK?” He’s a big guy. He says, “Didn’t you hear?” I said, “Hear what?” He said, “John Wayne died today.” I thought that was a great story, and I went back and told my girlfriend. I said, “Ain’t that interesting?” She said, “I’m a vegetarian.” I don’t know why. I just thought, I’m putting that in something someday. Because it just struck me as, all right, some people think something’s important. What one person hears is not the same thing as another person hears.I love Richard’s acting. I love acting for him and and he took the part really seriously, if you watch the movie, which he’s very good in.

Debbie Millman:

He is indeed. I had to go back to make sure I really understood what he was going for there.

Ethan Hawke:

Did you ever see Slacker?

Debbie Millman:

Yeah.

Ethan Hawke:

His first film?

Debbie Millman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ethan Hawke:

Anybody listening, go watch the opening scene of Slacker, about maybe I took the wrong bus, I think it was the … I think I took the wrong taxi. It’s a phenomenal monologue. I always wanted to get him back in front of the camera.

Debbie Millman:

You appeared in six of his films, and you’ve said that the experience of working on Before Sunset exceeded all expectations of what being involved in the world of film could be for you. In what way?

Ethan Hawke:

Well, I pray that every person who listens to this has a moment in their life where you feel like this immense gratitude for being in the right place at the right time, and that you felt like … it was so much fun to write that movie with Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater, to be in Paris. I was in a lot of pain personally, and having a place to put that pain was healing and not self-serving. It was in service of something better, greater. It was not navel-gazing, painting pictures of your tears or something like that. That film experience taught me a lot.

Ethan Hawke:

Rick and Julie are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever come across, and they’re also extremely educated in the language of film. They have an extremely high bar, and they know a lot. It was fun to be around them, and listen to Julie and Rick argue. I’ve learned a lot. It felt like, wow, this is where I’m supposed to be right now. I got to be in Paris making a movie with Juli
e Delpy, and it was a good one. I mean, what else do you want?

Debbie Millman:

I read that when you worked with Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2006, you realized that what made him so great was his experience playing smaller parts. During the years that he was doing that, you said that you were doing films like White Fang and getting paid a lot of money, and girls were asking for your autograph. While working with him, you realize you needed to work harder. I was wondering, harder in what way?

Ethan Hawke:

I watched Nobody’s Fool the other day, Paul Newman movie. Robert Benton directed. Really wonderful film, and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays this small-town deputy or something. He’s just kind of an idiot. Little part. He probably has 10 lines in the movie. I was friends with him back then. He worked so hard on that part. Who was that guy? What does he have in his pockets? How did he get the job? Why does he do this dumb thing? What’s his thing? He was rigorous with his imagination. I watched the movie, it’s years later, and he’s just so wonderful in it. When he started getting bigger parts, he applied the same rigor to every line he had.

Ethan Hawke:

I had kind of a “let’s get through this scene, I’m really looking forward to that scene, we’re going to shoot on Thursday” attitude. I started seeing the possibilities of … There’s a difference between the job of leading man and the job of a character actor. Fascinatingly enough, the job of the character actor is extremely challenging because you have to facilitate the story. You’ve got a job to do, and that’s your only part. Then you get laser-focused about it. Then when you come back to a larger part, you see smaller stitches in the fabric. You see how to sew it tighter. You see how that helps your scene partner. That’s really the change for me.

Debbie Millman:

Despite the lesson you learned from Philip Seymour Hoffman about working harder, you’ve also come to recognize that every time you tried to sell out, you fell on your ass—your words, not mine.

Ethan Hawke:

I like these quotes you’re finding.

Debbie Millman:

I suspect that you’re talking about your first foray into television, which I want to talk about briefly before going into “Good Lord Bird.” The Fox show, “Exit Strategy.” What happened with that show?

Ethan Hawke:

That was my midlife crisis. I turned 40. I felt like I had to quit being an artist and get a real job and hate it like everyone else.

Debbie Millman:

Why? Was it because of having so many children? Was it … I mean—

Ethan Hawke:

My wife was pregnant with my fourth kid, and the economy just dropped out in 2008, and I’d spent a lot of the previous years falling back in love with the theater. The thing you asked me about filling smaller parts—I got really interested in that, and I started doing smaller parts in some big Broadways. I did The Bridge Project, which we took Chekhov and Shakespeare all over the world. I did Coast of Utopia, which ran for a year. It’s a nine-hour play about Russian radicals. Hurlyburly I’d done for almost a year, and they’re all big ensemble pieces. I mean, some of those parts are big, some of them were small. While I was doing that, I was living like I was making a million dollars a year making movies and I was having a lot of children.

Ethan Hawke:

Well, when I was a kid, I was very, very fortunate. Dead Poets Society, I had this money. I got to do what I wanted to do, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I wasn’t getting cast. The younger actors were getting more parts, and you start seeing the world, and I just panicked. I love Antoine Fuqua. We had this idea of maybe we can make a great cop show. What if we did? Well, I started betting my mindset—well, if Antoine would do it, maybe we could make this badass cop show and sneak one through. I don’t mean to knock that show or whatever, but it’s just … they didn’t really let Antoine do what he wanted to do. The show never turned into the show that we had imagined it would be, and thank God it didn’t happen.

Debbie Millman:

You said that it ultimately resulted in you rebooting and revitalizing the next 10 years of your life. How?

Ethan Hawke:

I just started doing things I care. I have an amazing wife, and she’s an amazing partner. She’s not a materialist. She’s like, “Don’t do that. What are we making the money for?” She sees very clearly the kind of capitalist design that this country gets motivated by the accumulation of wealth, accumulation of possessions—that’s how we define success. We all just get on this treadmill and hate ourselves if we have to get off it, and feel like we failed if we don’t have the school that we want or the house that we want, and she just wasn’t buying into it. Then she’s like, “Let’s start making decisions based on love. Let’s tap. That’s what you need to do.” I started doing things I cared about, and then my career started going well again. It’s mysterious how that happens.

Debbie Millman:

It’s so interesting the arc of a career. You said that there have been three times over the course of your career that you felt washed up.

Ethan Hawke:

Yeah, completely.

Debbie Millman:

What made you continue on, and how did you overcome that sense of being over and done with or discarded? How did you find the way to reinvent yourself?

Ethan Hawke:

The world is not a very responsible critic. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Lots of things that are very good make people tremendous money, and lots of things that are staggeringly brilliant go unnoticed. I mean, through the history of the world and history of arts, if you are in service of your art, then everything’s easy. If you want the art to be in service of you, promoting you, if everything you do has to be successful, everything you do has to be “good,” then you’re always waiting for everybody’s reaction as opposed to really just engaging with what you want to communicate. What do you want to be doing? There’s so many churches in New York with basements where you can do a play.

Ethan Hawke:

There’s something that really moved me. I read this obituary of brilliant actor Paul Scofield. Late in his life, he was acting at a very high level, playing big parts, but only at the church near him. He realized that it doesn’t matter how many people see it, it matters what you do. I want to walk to work, and I’m going to play King Lear at my church. Everything gets washed away like a sandcastle anyway. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do with your time? One of the things that I do want to say, though, is sometimes when I say that people think that what I mean is I’m judgmental of other people’s actions, and I’m really not, I love all kinds of movies and all kinds of art. There’s nothing wrong wit
h doing “Exit Strategy” if you love “Exit Strategy.” I’m saying it matters to be you and figure out who you are. If you do that, then everything will take care of itself.

Debbie Millman:

Ethan, let’s talk about your most recent book, A Bright Ray of Darkness. Came out last month. Congratulations.

Ethan Hawke:

Thank you.

Debbie Millman:

It’s a wonderful book. The book brings us back to a character you actually first introduced to us in The Hottest State, William Harding. That really surprised me. Would you say that this is a sequel of sorts?

Ethan Hawke:

If I was forced to, maybe. But really it’s a continuation of a thought, in a way. Sometimes I think it’s not so much a sequel as a reboot. I was young when I wrote The Hottest State, and I was learning how to write. One of the things I really avoided and was ashamed of as a young writer is I wrote a book … The Hottest State is about young love, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m an actor, but acting has nothing to do with it.” I realized over the years that it would be really fun to have the cojones to write about acting, to not run away from that aspect of his life. Because there’s so much superficial writing about acting. It doesn’t really have a place in literature of … there’s not that many first-person accounts of an actor on stage. I thought, well, I really like writing. That might be interesting. I gave myself that challenge to revisit that character in maybe a more substantive way, a hopefully more substantive way.

Debbie Millman:

William talks about fame quite a lot in the book, and really is trying to deconstruct it. He talks about fame as the Black Death, and declares that we like to watch people die. So we put them on magazines and fan the flames of their ego, they catch fire and explode. But at the same time, the character pleads with the lord to grant him the Black Death, because it’s very seductive, isn’t it?

Ethan Hawke:

Yeah.

Debbie Millman:

Do you feel like you understand that moral dilemma better? Do you feel like you still have that moral dilemma?

Ethan Hawke:

What’s that St. Augustine line? “Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet.” It’s like I really want to be sober, tomorrow. I mean a lot of times when a young actor gets told, “Oh, you are great in that show,” they’re not really sure what it is that you mean, right? They don’t know themselves, they don’t know what … What do you mean I’m amazing? Your brain when you’re left alone, like, “Why do you say that? What did I do?” That compliment immediately turns into fear because you’re like, “Well, if I do anything much different, maybe they won’t think I’m amazing because I don’t understand what it is that’s working. If I change, I might screw it up.” You end up keep being the same person.

Ethan Hawke:

We all know, as a grownup, you got to keep changing. You got to keep evolving. He said this thing about, after I said being washed up three times, how do you reinvent yourself? Trying to reinvent yourself for me is a mistaken way of thinking. The washed-up thing is actually just a perception. I’m often so disappointed when I start getting offered movies again, good parts, when it comes back again because often the work that I do when I’m busted is the best. By the best, I mean it’s the most true to me. When things start going well, you start getting decent offers and you can go to Istanbul and make a lot of fun movie everybody’s going to see. It’s very seductive, but it also takes you away from the self that comes out when nobody else cares. I think change is good, and I think the Black Death for me is being frozen in that formaldehyde where you’re just trying to stay this thing that everybody likes.

Debbie Millman:

The book takes us back to 2003. William Harding is getting a divorce from his beautiful, famous wife and is working in the theater playing the part of Hotspur in the show Henry IV, and back in 2003.

Ethan Hawke:

Yeah, the book isn’t set in 2003. The book is set in an anonymous time … People put that in there because they know that something like that happened to me. But I’m using 30 years of experience and putting it in this one fictional production that’s more like 2016 or something. It’s like I’m combining a life in the theater and turning it into this fictional production. What was your question?

Debbie Millman:

Well, really it was about how there were all of these similarities that you were using in this fictional way, and confronting so much pain both as what it felt like to me as the reader, William Harding, aka Ethan Hawke. Yes, there are certainly differences, but it felt like you were confronting a lot of the pain that you shared with your main character.

Ethan Hawke:

Absolutely. I love fiction that feels personal. There’s something about the first-person narrative. I think that I have found that using writing to make it more personal because my whole life as an actor is becoming John Brown, becoming somebody else. But writing is a place for me to explore what’s happening in this rib cage. I do the same thing with Jesse. There’s a certain Jesse in the Beforetrilogy, this character that I’ve written, and there’s certain events that do happen to me, Ethan, that I feel like belong in the universe of Jesse. Then I have this weird character of William Harding that, when I do something really stupid, I think, oh, that’s where Willie … that would be great for William to experience.

Ethan Hawke:

They’re exaggerated versions, they’re heightened situations, but they are things that are personal to me. For example, I was saying to you about the real healing power of Before Sunset, part of why I wanted to write A Bright Ray of Darkness is to explain to the reader that when acting is really working, it’s working in this dance with the audience and the author. What I was talking about with Robin Williams, there’s this healing power that can happen in storytelling. Your whole life, right? Your emotions are always in your way. You’re tripping on them. Why did I get so angry at him? Why did I say that stupid thing? Why did I start crying when my mom brought that up again? I thought I worked through that.

Ethan Hawke:

Your emotions are always in your way, and acting is this one place where you can take these feelings in your gut and you put them on stage and you put them in from the camera, and it’s not narcissism. It’s in service of the story. It’s a service of Prince [inaudible] or Jesse and Celine, or Jake in Training Day, or whatever. You’re using this well that you have. I thought, that’s what A Bright Ray of Darkness is to me, is turning something dark into something bright, and how do you do this? Yes, it’s all deeply personal to me. When I sit down with a pen and paper, this other thing happens. I just have to trust it and try to be disciplined with it and try to give the rea
der something worth their time.

Debbie Millman:

William also states that the public makes a big deal of acting, as if it’s the celebration of the individual, and you write how the irony is when acting is going well, it’s like the individual dissipates entirely, and nowhere in your work is that more evident than in your playing abolitionist John Brown in “The Good Lord Bird,” the seven-part Showtime series adapted from James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award–winning novel, and you have an award-nominated performance as well. You also wrote and directed this series. One thing I felt in watching this performance is when indeed Ethan Hawke does essentially disappear as he does, and you become John Brown. There seems to be so much confidence in your embodying this character, your effortless confidence in disappearing as Ethan Hawke. I’m wondering if that was even something that was intentional, if you’re even aware of.

Ethan Hawke:

I remember reading somewhere about a football coach that was just insane about making sure all the players had their shoes tied right and their laces were aligned in the right way, and people were teasing him about it. He said something about how inside every detail you can see the hole. I mentioned this to say that I’ve spent my life thinking about acting. Slowly, you start to figure out how to lace your shoes, how to wear your pants, how to learn your lines, what voice and speech is, what movement is, and you don’t learn it all at once. Some of it starts to be—if you’re building the right habits—starts to be instinctual. In reference to the novel, I’m a young writer. I’m an old man actor. But writing is still really young to me. I don’t really know what I’m doing.

Ethan Hawke:

I learned a lot on this. This new novel, for me, was all about the architecture of the novel. I started understanding what people talk about in regards to the architecture of writing. I started seeing it differently. That happened to me a long time ago with acting. I’ve “succeeded” as an actor and I’ve failed as an actor. I’ve had these experiences. Through those experiences, a confidence does arise. You learn that not everybody knows what they’re talking about, and you got to listen to the right moment and not listen at the right moment, and it’s really tough to know.

Debbie Millman:

What inspired you to make a movie about John Brown?

Ethan Hawke:

The genius of James McBride. Race in America, it’s a wound that hasn’t healed because we don’t look at it, we don’t talk about it, we keep wanting to move on as if … in the DNA structure of this country is a crime. When we don’t look at it, it doesn’t get better. My mom would say all the time, one of the great failures of her generation is she thought that when MLK was murdered, that would be the fire of which we would restructure the zoning of this country, the police of this country, the school systems of this country. She thought her generation would do that, that that’s what they were marching for. Then it all quiets down, and then we think Obama’s elected and we all like to think, well, now all this stuff is gone.

Ethan Hawke:

It’s not gone. It’s very real. But it’s very difficult to make art about it because the guilt, the fear, the shame and the anger is real. McBride writes this story. Yeah, John Brown is the main character, he’s the event of the movie, but the narrator is this young boy who John Brown thinks he’s liberating, and the kid thinks he’s kidnapped, and he puts him in a dress. At the first minute, you think you’re making this abolitionist piece and it’s going to be about Dudley Do-Right doing the right thing like you’re … John Brown’s nuts. He puts a kid in the dress and you think you’re talking about black and white, but now you’re talking about gender, and you think you’re going to talk about North and South, except John Brown hates the North as much as he hates the South.

Ethan Hawke:

Freedom for young Black men at that time didn’t look a lot better than what he was getting in the South. I mean, it’s not North, it’s not South, it’s not left, it’s not right, it’s not white and Black. It’s human, and it has all this love in it. I read this book, and I laughed my ass off. My wife said to me, “What are you laughing about?” I said, “The Good Lord Bird.” She said, “Isn’t it about John Brown?” I was like, “Yeah, how is this possible that I’m laughing?” I really wanted everyone in America to read the book. Then my wife and I started talking about, “Well, maybe we should make it a movie.” Then we met McBride, and he is one of the most gracious and … you have that fantasy when you were a kid of what it might be like to meet a great novelist.

Ethan Hawke:

You imagine meeting Tolstoy or something, how wise they would be. I want to go out to dinner with Toni Morrison. She would be so smart and discerning and say the right thing. You meet McBride, it’s like it’s OK to meet your heroes. He’s a beautiful person, and he treated me with respect and he treated my wife with respect. He treats everybody he meets with respect. I thought, I want to do whatever I can to be in a room being creative with this human being, and I’m so glad I did. Personally, I can’t believe that the movie came out. I can’t believe we made it happen.

Debbie Millman:

Well, it’s a remarkable story for our listeners that might not be aware of who John Brown is. He was a fierce opponent of slavery who was hung in 1859 after seizing an armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a slave rebellion. Quite a lot of people believe that this was the first battle of the Civil War. Ethan, you know what I was thinking about as I was watching it and reading about it because I didn’t know about the book before? Why weren’t we taught more about John Brown in school?

Ethan Hawke:

The answer to that question is Black Lives Matter. It’s a big answer. You were not taught about John Brown on purpose. Because if you teach people really seriously that the Civil War, what it was about, what was happening, how African Americans in this country were being treated, and why a white Christian would want to take over the nation’s largest armory and demand equal rights for everybody, way back when, and they didn’t want to teach you about him—it was much easier to rewrite history and try to make peace and try to move on, and not really assess what was at the root of that big giant fight where so many people died.

Debbie Millman:

Well, thank you for bringing this life to work, Ethan. It’s a remarkable series. I really hope everybody listening can watch it. I have two more questions for you. The first is about the state of the world. Small question. Broadway has been dark over a year now. I read that this is the least you’ve performed in a year of your entire life since adolescence. Are you doing any performance work at all?

Ethan Hawke:

It’s hard. I just did a Zoom production of Waiting for Godot that will be available for people to stream. John Leguizamo, Tariq from The Roots, Wallace Shawn and I.

Debbie Millman:

Oh wow.

Ethan Hawke:

It’s not just the reading of it, we memorized it and perform it on Zoom. It’s crazy and nuts, but it was a wonderful way for us to feel the actor in us. I did a small part in Robert Eggers’ film, this kind of viking epic. I’ve been trying to do my thing, but that’s where perhaps this generation under me might wind up being one of the most substantive generations we’ve had since my … I always think about my grandfather having lived … he was a kid in the Depression, and he never forgot the things he learned as a kid in that era. I think a lot of young people are understanding how the NBA just doesn’t happen. The movie theaters, theater, colleges, summer camps, there’s so much to be grateful for that we didn’t even know to be grateful for in the sense of our interconnectivity and the natural world, and I think might end up hitting them in a way that escaped my generation. I’m hopeful that something good could come out of that. But certainly, the state of the world is something to talk about.

Debbie Millman:

Leads me to my last question. In A Bright Ray of Darkness you write that there must be some faulty gene in humans that motivates them to want to step out in front of 1,000 of their brothers and sisters on stage just to be judged, and that we wouldn’t do this unless we were hopelessly insecure. But as you were taking me through all of William Harding’s theatrical experiences, I realized how much he took it for granted, that we all took it for granted, that 1,000 brothers and sisters were allowed to congregate around this stage in the first place. I’m wondering if it’s changed your perspective at all. Do you still think that it’s insecurity as the motivation, or do you think it could be just a profound need to connect?

Ethan Hawke:

That part of me that’s writing William in that moment is not really my worldview. That’s the insecure, dark, broken, character version of me. It’s like a different entity. I believe in the power of connection and I believe that we all know it to be true that feeling seen is so beautiful, and feeling unseen is so hurtful. That’s what’s so important about diversity in our artforms, and from all kinds of people in every walk of life. Part of what art is supposed to do is represent our collective consciousness. It’s our collective imagination. It’s how we talk to each other and share our ideas, and it has real power. For me, I love the movies, I love them a lot, but when you’re at a concert, sweaty, and somebody rips a killer solo and you’re dancing, and you know you’ll never return to this moment, this concert, this day.

Ethan Hawke:

I mean, I remember when I first arrived in New York, I’d meet older actors and they’d be like, “I was there. Streetcar Named Desire. It was a Wednesday, I got standing room only. Brando was on fire. I think he had an erection or something.” You know what I mean? The craziest stuff comes out of people’s mouth because they were really there. They were there with the performers, and there’s this magic that happens. I remember Paul Dano and I were doing True West. I was on Broadway, whatever, I guess 18 months, two years ago now. It’s all … time is so strange. But in the silences, the lines are almost percussive. Pop, pop, pop! Pop, pop, pop! You start to hear the percussion and the silence becomes a part of the language of the play. The audience is actually participating in our rhythms, and I would get high from that. I mean it would take us, Paul and I, to new places, deeper, stronger places. I’m so sad not to be with that audience.

Debbie Millman:

Yeah, I can’t wait to be back. Ethan Hawke, thank you so much for making the world a more interesting place with your work.

Ethan Hawke:

Thank you. But thanks for being so well-researched, for doing such a serious interview. That’s not easy to do. I know that.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you.

Ethan Hawke:

I really appreciate it.

Debbie Millman:

Thank you, Ethan. Ethan Hawke’s latest book is A Bright Ray of Darkness, and he could be seen on Showtime in “The Good Lord Bird.” This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

The post Design Matters: Ethan Hawke appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

A confession: I am one of those people who tends to recoil at the thought of performance art. And it’s not due to unfamiliarity, or for lack of trying to appreciate it; at any number of shows I’ve attended, I’ve sat there, frozen, a stoic, thoughtful, art-appreciating look on my face as I panicked internally and fantasized about deflating my body and sinking to the floor and out of the room.

In seeking a lofty word to define my issue with it, I fail and arrive, simply, at uncomfortable. The movements seem … unnatural. Locking eyes with a performer makes my heart palpitate. With my back and legs aching, I resist shifting my weight in my chair for fear of distracting someone else or, god forbid, drawing any modicum of attention to myself and having an interaction with the performer.

The perceived awkwardness of it all haunts me, prompting an inescapable urge to flee. Flee!

But Jack Ferver is changing that.

The cosmopolitan performer, choreographer, writer and director comes from rural Prairie du Sac, Wisc., a town of 4,000 people. Ferver was raised in an environment that seemingly sought to purge him from it. He took his first dance class at the age of 6. For not fitting the standard mold of the community, he was terrorized by his peers, relentlessly and painfully (he has since described his childhood as “like Boys Don’t Cry, but without the funny parts”). He sought to be scarce, discreet, absent. He escaped into fantasy worlds, to the woods, into scenes from beloved films like Return to Oz that he would act out. As a teenager, he later absconded to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where he studied theater and took a wide array of dance classes.

Ferver has observed that he was probably meant to have been born in another era—say, that of Bette Davis’ Hollywood. Others might contend that the more pressing cosmic error is that he should have been born in another city. But had he been, he could have turned out to be a much different creative. As he has said, all of the bullying and horrors of his childhood meant that he had to make his dreams a reality. There was no other option. Moreover, he was drawn to acting and dancing for the magic in their form: One can rehearse, and perform actions over and over and over again until they are perfect—juxtaposing the chaos of the real world. In performance, there is control.

Righting the universe a tad, he moved to New York City. And over the years he has turned out an array of lauded performances, from reinterpretations of Poltergeist to an infused take on Cleopatra. As his official bio breaks it all down, “His genre-defying performances, which have been called ‘so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms’ (The New Yorker), explore the tragicomedy of the human psyche. Ferver’s ‘darkly humorous’ (The New York Times) works interrogate and indict an array of psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of sexual orientation, gender and power struggles.”

His work is perhaps at its best when the lens is turned inward. Two Alike examines the brand of abuse of queer youth that Ferver and Marc Swanson experienced. In Mon, Ma, Mes, Ferver deconstructs his various personas to see what is left after they have been stripped away. Night Light Bright Light parallels Ferver’s life with that of dancer Fred Herko, who died by suicide. His most recent work, Everything is Imaginable, studies early obsessions, and spawns from his traumatic childhood.

I’ve pondered if Ferver finds catharsis in his work, if he finds healing. If the act of acting things out, rehearsing them over and over, in any way helps him assert control over the pain and chaos that was his youth. But that might all be to miss the point. Mirrors frequently appear in Ferver’s work, and he has said that a mirror is exactly how he views his role. He believes that by examining himself, he is examining the world at large.

By exorcising (or, perhaps, exercising) his demons, it causes viewers to reflect—and in many cases, that journey leads them deeper inward, a circle of life of sorts. For me, it causes an analysis of what, exactly, makes me so uncomfortable with performance art—attending it, absorbing it. (And it’s worth noting here that Ferver, in particular, excels at generating an environment conducive to this; as The New York Times has written, “With his mad blue Bette Davis eyes and penchant for public suffering, he is good at making a spectacle of himself, and—more to the point—he excels at making his audiences deeply uncomfortable.”)

Maybe it’s the intimacy of it all—or my own random issues with intimacy. Maybe it’s the strange, alien movements of the human body, choreographed so precisely—or the fact that I’ve never been entirely comfortable with my own, and to study someone else’s on stage feels like such a violation. Maybe it’s the locking of eyes and the digital age is to blame, with more and more of our daily interactions taking place on screens, turning human connection into a novel notion. It’s easy to watch a character on a film screen who doesn’t stare back; it’s easy to look at a painting, alone in a quiet gallery with your thoughts. But performance forces you to actually confront them.

Jack Ferver really is a mirror. In analyzing and interpreting his life and the world around him and presenting it back to us, we’re not always certain what it is that we’re looking at. But we feel. And thus we experience the world, and ourselves, in an entirely new way.

—Zachary Petit, Design Matters Media Editor-in-Chief

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