Brian Koppelman joins to talk about his remarkable life, sharing why he became a writer after years of working as a record promoter and producer.
Brian Koppelman joins to talk about his remarkable life, sharing why he became a writer after years of working as a record promoter and producer.
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.