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Jacob sits down with story lecturer and concept artist Mike Hill to discuss why films aren't resonating as deeply as they once did and what we can do to tell better stories. The conversation delves into the future of the film industry, the potential impact of AI on the creative arts, and the importance of taking risks and creating art that stands the test of time. With a focus on the subconscious and technical aspects of storytelling, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in becoming a better storyteller.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jacob
So I was listening to another podcast, I believe it was the Collective Podcast that you did recently, and you were talking about how when you watched one of the new Star Wars, I believe it was Star Wars: The Force Awakens that you didn't get the feeling you wanted to have when watching that movie. I was curious what is the feeling you're looking for when you're watching a film?
Mike
I think it's a feeling of resonance that the patterns that are playing out through the characters, the storyline, the conflict and the challenges – resonate on a level that is psychologically true to life. And for me, there's two sides to getting that resonance. There's a technical side to storytelling, which is there's got to be cause and effect. There's got to be consequentiality. There’s got to be establishing a clear, psychologically and emotionally relevant pattern of problems. And then there's got to be a sensical – I don't mean procedural – I mean a believable set of reactions and actions that characters take to solve a problem. So on the one side, there's the technical aspect to storytelling, not like a mechanism, but just as a series of consequential actions. It's got to flow in a way that is real to life. And really, I think that's ultimately what was missing for me when I watch something like The Force Awakens is I can feel and I can also articulate to some degree when I analyze a film what's gone wrong in the writing process that leads to the absence of that feeling. And what's useful about films like the Force Awakens is you've got a clear ability do a side by side, which is, okay, well, here's this thing that made millions of people, billions of people feel something for 40 years, and here's this new derivative of that thing, which is clearly divisive in its reception in the world at large. So then you simply say, well, what's happening? What's changed? Let’s do a side by side comparison, especially because The Force Awakens has so many surface level attributes that are lifted from the original. But what's missing is the hidden architecture of storytelling and psychology, which is what ultimately went missing with these sequels.
Jacob
And I do want to talk about that architecture, but I also want to ask specifically when it comes to The Force Awakens – do you think that part of it, too, is that they tried to too closely mirror those original films that people loved? Because I've been studying James Cameron for the last couple of months, and what he always does with his sequels is he takes the part of the pieces people love, but he presents them to you in a new way. And with The Force Awakens, it felt like they were just trying to recreate the original film in a modern context.
Mike
Yeah, absolutely. And I can speculate about what's gone on in the process behind the scenes on The Force Awakens, first of all, whereas the original film is handled by a few individuals in a very focused creative flow. When you get to a behemoth like Disney handling a sequel, it's going to be basically a creative process of committee, which means that, okay, well, this executive producer with a relatively big ego and a lot of power has decided over the weekend that they really liked a scene from the original movie and that they can tie in with, you know, some gimmick with some modern actor. And then that becomes the primary drive of the writing room, is to now bring in this extrinsic, completely arbitrary feature of some executive producer. So I think that what James Cameron does so well is that because he's a force of nature, he gets to maintain such a high level of creative control that it doesn't get diluted by committees and by extrinsic factors. There's probably no one in Hollywood, for want of a better word, that has an ego as big as James Cameron. So he's got the confidence to say what he wants and he's got the commercial backing to prove his worth. So there's less people challenging James Cameron, which also can backfire, as George Lucas found out with the prequels, and I would say James Cameron's found out with Avatar. I think that you do need constraints from the outside world to push through. I'll give you a good example, Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. Terminator 1, you know, was a vision that he had after a fever dream in Italy where he had a dream and he visualized the Terminator. And then he came up with this concise story on a shoestring budget and constraints drove the whole thing. And then when he was asked to do a sequel, for a series of reasons which are quite obscure. I'll just summarize it: he had to get a script out in two weeks before the Cannes Film Festival. So he and the co-writer had two weeks to squeeze out Terminator 2, and that pressure is like they squeezed out a diamond in two weeks. And I actually think that that is a very healthy thing. Sometimes when you've got a creative like James Cameron, you have to say now you don't have 11 years to work on the sequel James, you've got two weeks. And that makes you think in very clear, bold terms. Okay, well, I've got this original film. It's Sarah Connor. She has to survive the assassination of the Terminator and is going to give birth to John Connor. She's a kind of soft, doughy waitress, and she turns into something that's far more kind of empowered and independent. Well, how do we invert that for a sequel? Well, she goes from being empowered, driving off into the stormy sunset on the Mexico highway with John Connor in her belly. And then the first time we see her again in Terminator 2, she's considered a psychopath and she's in a mental asylum. So her entire world has been thrown upside down. All of our preconceptions have been turned upside down. And then that immediately finds the ability for you to say, well, okay, what's this story about? It's about a mother and son relationship. It's about finding redemption, rekindling a broken family relationship. And then suddenly you see that the Terminator, Sarah and John suddenly become, metaphorically speaking, placeholders for family dynamics and boom, it's no longer time travel. It's about the reunification of a broken family and trust and finding faith in humanity again and finding faith in a loved one. Suddenly those are human things. So I've gone off on a tangent there, but James Cameron was the master of doing that, and he did exactly the same thing for the record, when he picked up Ridley Scott's Alien was asked to do the sequel or when he wanted to do the sequel, he followed a very similar template, which is he took Sigourney Weaver and then immediately established at the beginning of Aliens when she awakes from cryo sleep, her family, her daughter has died in that time that she was away, which suddenly the audience now recognizes that the emotional weight of Ripley's journey is coming to atonement for the fact that she's lost her daughter. And what does Cameron then do? An exactly the same aged daughter, a girl is found on the alien planet, and then she has a chance to redeem herself and basically get closure and atonement for that emotional breakage that happens at the beginning of the film. So Cameron's very particular in establishing genuinely good family psychological emotional dynamics, which is ironic because he can come across as a hardass, but he knows what he's doing, you know?
Jacob
Absolutely. Have you heard the Tarantino quote on Howard Stern in the nineties where it's someone shows up to heaven and they see somebody on a crane taking footage of everyone when they're coming in and they went, “oh, I didn't know James Cameron was in Heaven. And they went, no, no, no, he's not. God just thinks he's James Cameron.” That’s not verbatim but I was reading a book Cameron interviews and that was like the quote that started off one of the interviews.
Mike
Tarantino has got the best insights on everything.
Jacob
Yeah, I could listen to him talk for hours. He gets me excited listening to him talk. I want to go create as soon as I finished listening to him, but back to those stories with Terminator 2, with Aliens, are those themes something – especially with Terminator 2, with only two weeks to write, I know him and Bill Wisher had been talking about it for months or years, even leading up to it just casually how they would do a sequel. But in those two weeks, is that a thought that comes out consciously or is it a subconscious thought that he's not necessarily realized he's doing when he's writing that story to make this family dynamic? Is that something, as storytellers you should be thinking of in the moment, or is that a subconscious thing that just comes out without even thinking about it?
Mike
Well, I've had the sort of privilege after doing various lectures on Cameron and Spielberg, I ended up being moved to L.A. to work under the working studios, you know, within the inner circles of some high end people like David Fincher and Tim Miller. And Tim worked with James Cameron. Cameron has watched my analysis and the feedback was “there are things in here which I'm not conscious of, but I accept are there, there are things here that are attributed to symbolism when they're actually just technical choices that were consistent.” So style basically being a side effect of consistency in technical execution. And there are some things that, you know, he thinks is just completely overseeing things. But the one takeaway that I took from the feedback was that he basically said that he had no conscious knowledge of Joseph Campbell, the monomyth, the psychological building blocks of story. He was just riffing, you know, unconsciously. And to me that I think that completely makes complete sense because all Joseph Campbell's monomyth theory is effectively a codification of unconscious patterns. So naturally the unconscious creates those patterns and the conscious encodes them. But you don't have to have any knowledge of the conscious patterns to be able to unconsciously bring forth ideas that just resonate. And I think that what's important about that observation is that that is the reason that directors have very strong younger years, but they can become ossified in their later films – because they're riffing on the unconscious kind of passions when they're younger, just like what feels cool, what feels right, what feels groovy, you know? And then when they get to say, Ridley Scott, age 75, whereas, okay, well, let's dust off the Alien franchise, let's dust off Gladiator. It's no longer riffing on the unconscious. It's just kind of like, well, I don't want to retire yet. So I guess let's try and recreate a sequel to this franchise or something. So yes, I think it's largely, almost exclusively the unconscious and the conscious brain is just there to double check, you know, cross the T's and dot the I's effectively and just make sure that everything’s tight.
Jacob
When should you revisit a sequel?
Mike
I think there's a quote from David Fincher, and I'm butchering it, but it is to the effect of a script should be the reason you make a sequel, not an excuse. And by that, what he means is the only time you should ever make a sequel is when an idea that's so strong has pushed through into the minds of the writers and they've generated a script and they say, “this is actually a great sequel”. Let's go and see if a studio wants to make it. What happens most often is it's the inverse, which is the studio says, “Well, which franchise can we drill for more profits now? They identify what franchise is ready to be resurrected. They set up a writers room with no clear idea of why there should be another sequel, just that there should be. And then suddenly what you have is this committee based, “well, okay, how can we justify spending 200 million and marketing a sequel to this film just to gain profits when there's not actually an idea there? So, for example, I worked on Blade Runner 2049 – that wasn't a script that was developed because of studio interest. That was a script that was developed because the original writers or the script writers who were translating Philip K Dick's work, they saw an opportunity to tell a new story in that world, and they developed a script that was really, really strong. And then it got shopped around in highly private circles. And then Dennis Villeneuve came across it and thought, I love the original Blade Runner. This is a great script, and I will make it because I don't want anyone else to bugger it up in his own words because I just didn't want you want to fuck it up. So ultimately the idea should demand to be made. The studio shouldn’t demand an idea to be generated.
Jacob
But yet they keep demanding that they be generated. Is it purely a financial thing?
Mike
I think things move in cycles. So we're reaching the end of a, let’s say, multi-decade process where film studios have spent so much time investing in rehashes and reboots and sequels that the audience – eventually the free market votes with their ticket buying and it's been effective up until now but it's a bit like – the best way I can think to describe it is that when you start selling cinema tickets like their drugs, there comes a point where for a certain period of time you can keep cutting the quality of the drugs and for a short period of time you'll actually make more money. Because if you half the quality of, you know, a bag of heroin and your addicts don't get high on it, they'll come back and buy a second bag. And it's a bit of a weird analogy, but the point I'm making is that when you don't give people the satisfaction they're looking for, for a short period of time, they'll just buy more, hoping that they'll get a fix. But eventually you basically emotionally and psychologically traumatize an audience over time, it’s like Chinese water torture, where it gets to a point where people are going into the cinema and buying tickets and buying streaming but they're actually feeling nothing because all the the material is being generated in huge quantities is just ossified, self-referential, lacking in originality, lacking in any spiritual or emotional depth. And then eventually what happens is the sales dry up, which is what we're seeing with I don't know, was it phase whatever of the Marvel franchise. There comes a point where you're pushing on a piece of string. 20 years ago, Marvel was a solid stick that you could push, you know, into the market and it would affect the market. Now it's like having a piece of spaghetti and you're pushing it, but it's just not having any effect on anything. And eventually what will happen and it will be I think it will be fairly dramatic is that there will be just a systemic break at some point where the big studios collapse in their current form and from the pieces the latent talent within those studios will step full step forward and make something new. And all of the bloated, bureaucratic administration that comes with making a film of which I can assure – the majority of these institutions are pointless middlemen that add weight to the budgets and degrade the quality of the projects. But eventually it crumbles in on itself. And I think that's what's actually happening. The above line costs are 90% of the movie. For a flight, a ticket for an executive producer to visit the set in a private jet and then go back to the US. You know, they fly to Europe and come back, it costs $50,000. You can fly the entire crew around Europe multiple times for that amount of money on a commercial charter. So you have like ten executive producers. They’re literally taking up 90% of the budget. Instead of that money going on screen, you could quite easily, under a more nimble business model, make four or five times as many movies, which is nuts. But eventually the talent will be part of the Renaissance, and the talentless will be part of the carnage of the collapse, which is the same in any institution over time.
Jacob
And you talk about cycles. So this most recent time we had where the power was with the creator, the director, more than with the studio would be the nineties, right? The indie wave of the nineties. When guys like Tarantino and Rodriguez and all those guys came up, right? That's the most recent time we've had. We've seen that.
Mike
Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, Tarantino talks about how the seventies was a period of great innovation in movies and experimentation. Then the eighties, which I think the eighties generated some good movies. And he says that too as well. It's not like he's saying the whole decade was a waste of time. But, you know, the eighties became more formulaic and executive produced kind of studio films. In the nineties, you saw another resurgence of great movies. The nineties is just ridiculous. Like the nineties was one of the greatest periods in filmmaking. You know, I think ‘93 in one summer, four of the greatest films ever made came out and one go. It was like Jurassic Park and Shawshank Redemption. You go to the cinema and take your pick of classics that had just been released, whereas now you go to the cinema and it's just I mean – it's, it's a wasteland. I mean, I genuinely think it's a spiritually bankrupt wasteland, the cinema going experience now. So the nineties was great. The noughties had a few good moments. The last ten years I would say has been relatively disastrous and the cycle of culture and the cycle of films are deeply intertwined. Anyone who looks around right now can see that we are in an unraveling culturally, psychologically, collectively, the systems of belief that we had are falling apart. People can sense it. You know, COVID was one component of that. The various, let's say, top down measures that are being initiated by governments across the world is a sign of fracturing, because when something's in control, you don't squeeze as hard as you know, the upper levels of society are doing right now. So we are going through an unraveling. And when that unraveling takes place, it becomes a trauma that inspires the renaissance of the next generation. And I think that's what we're going to see in the next ten years and there's a three year lag as well. So the things we're seeing now were greenlit three years ago, so we haven't yet even seen the creative output that's going to come as a side effect of the last three years of experience, which have been drastically different from the previous 25 years, that, you know, nobody making films in the nineties could have could have fathomed what it would have be like to live from 2020 to 2023. So we're going to see basically a fresh surge of creativity in the next few years.
Jacob
Do you think part of the reason that these sequels have done so well is – you mentioned how people aren't feeling anything, but do you almost think that for the audience that's a benefit? With so much chaos going on around them that filmmaking almost acts as a form of self-soothing? And if they don't have to feel anything, that's fine because everything outside of the theater is going poorly for them.
Mike
Yes and no. I think that ultimately film is a form of catharsis. You can call it two things and they mean the same thing. Like therapy and escapism are the same thing. When you go to therapy, you're going through a form of escapism from your current mindset. And when you go to escapism, you're numbing yourself to your current mindset. A great story should be cathartic escapism. We don't have great stories that are cathartic escapism they’re just escapism. So you go and watch Jurassic World Dominion. There is not a single spiritually enriching, emotionally enriching, sociologically enriching idea in any of those godforsaken sequels. None. It is bereft of meaning, meaningless, utter crap. And that is because it's generated by people who are only capable of generating utterly meaningless crap, which is the executive producer class that just has very shallow values and is exporting it to the rest of the world. People are tired. People go to the cinema to feel connected and to feel resonance with themselves and with each other. That's why films like [the original] Jurassic Park hit such a universal audience. So I would say that the future of storytelling is returning to something that actually has some emotional spiritual resonance. And these films don't. If Jurassic Park is like a nutritious meal that just enriches your body, then Jurassic Park Dominion is just like sitting with a box of sugary, poisonous candy. Sure, they're both digestible, but one of them is going to make you feel better. And the other one's going to make you very, very sick and over time will kill you.
Jacob
This renaissance that’s going to happen. It's not going to be a complete doing away with the current state; it will be marrying it with story, right? Because right now I feel it's all spectacle. I feel like there's a half assed story just to get to the spectacle and no story itself. So do you think that it'll overcorrect? It'll go all story with no spectacle? Or will it find somewhere in the middle?
Mike
Well, the reason why we're not going to do spectacle is because spectacle used to be the exclusive domain of budget, big budget movies, because the actual capacity to make spectacle was limited to those who had a checkbook that was basically unlimited. You know, back in the day. I mean, Christ, if you look at what AI can do now, it's rendering entire departments of CGI houses irrelevant because in a handful of hours it can generate simulations of physical – physics simulations and then layer on top of that rendering. And then you can effectively create spectacle in Unreal Engine 5 with an AI assistant. You know, it's insane. It's insane. So it's no longer going to be the exclusive domain of the big studios to have spectacle. And then the creative power comes back into the hands of the guerilla filmmakers and the indie filmmakers. And then though, those indie filmmakers who have the ability to master this new wave of technology are going to be able to completely outperform the storytelling and the spectacle of Warner Brothers and Legendary and Marvel. So I think we're not going to lose spectacle. I just think that it's going to find itself being employed in the service of great storytelling again. And that can only happen when individuals are at the helm of the stories rather than executives and committees, which is a completely impersonal system rather than creative energy coming from individuals. So, you know, that seems to be the general pattern that I've noticed. You know, like even on Blade Runner, right? There's committees and there are executive producers, but there's also this kind of strange anomaly that's at the center of this film production, which all of the executive producers recognize is kind of important, which is this visionary director called Dennis Villeneuve. And because he's got, let's say, momentum and inertia and clout within Hollywood for his recent films and his award winning films, he gets more traction with getting his decisions through than, say, some director who made some indie film in 2007 or 2008, who then got brought in to the upper echelons of Hollywood, not because they're creative visionaries, but because they're competent people to point the camera where the executives want them to point it. So a lot of these directors – and Dennis Villeneuve isn’t one of them – Dennis Villeneuve is a man who's hired and respected to bring the vision to life. Most of these directors are actually just seen as glorified cameramen, and they are expected to bow down to the whims and desires of whatever their paymasters tell them to do. And that can be because of arbitrary desires, such as just personal politics as we see with Star Wars and the kind of the woke upper management of Disney, which is now falling flat on its face because the market just hates it. The market doesn't want to be preached at with these progressive messages. So that falls by the wayside eventually. And yeah, and ultimately it collapses. It's inevitable, it collapses and we're already seeing it in the box office returns.
Jacob
With the rise of AI and giving power back to the individual now – I'm assuming that's going to lead us to an overabundance of content because if everyone can make something, then everyone in theory will make something. What do you think is going to separate those pieces that are going to rise above the rest?
Mike
When I first started getting into concept art – I went through various stages in my career from Illustrator to 3D modeler to VFX artist to script consultant to everything in between. And I remember that when I started there was this phase where if you were an illustrator that worked in 2D you would call it a 2D artist, which is where you have your canvas, you have your paints, you have your paintbrush, and you make an image. If you suddenly said, “well, I think I could get better imagery and better levels of production, out of moving into 3D animation” you would have the 2D artists kind of scoff at how that's not real art because a computer helped you, right? And why that's a stupid analogy to say that is you could equally say to an artist you didn't mix your own paints or kill the animal for the hair that made the paintbrush. Therefore you're not part of the entire process. So the artistic process is looking for ways to express whatever it is you have to bring to the world. And everyone has something to bring to the world. Some people are craftsmen, so they've developed a craft which makes them more capable of making a product but that doesn't necessarily mean they have more to say. It generally does because people that develop a craft have to have a certain level of discipline that forces them to really take seriously the act of making things. So generally speaking, craftsmen always have a higher capacity to make something that resonates. But then there's also people that have no technical abilities that are like poets – a great example of this is Rick Rubin, the music producer. So Rick Rubin, I found this out recently. I've just started reading his book, but Rick Rubin has been one of the most important muses for musicians for the last, you know, 25, 30 years, ranging from all of the most celebrated musicians. And they come to him because they respect his opinion and they respect his insights and his intuitions. The guy can't work a production board. He doesn't play any instruments. He's got no musical technical ability whatsoever. He's just more like a kind of philosopher muse that can bring his insights to what he thinks is working and not working in the musical context. So, on paper he's got no technical abilities whatsoever, but he can guide a creative process. And the reason I'm bringing all that up is because I think that ultimately the people that learn to see OpenAI as a new canvas for by association, which is the creative process, which is putting juxtapositioning ideas together to generate something new, those who are thinking in a poetic mindset will have an opportunity to actually make things that were previously unfathomable. So I think that what's going to happen is we're going to get more content than we've ever had before, but we're also going to have a very interesting process of free market selection because the Internet is basically a filtering machine and the people that are on the Internet, if the algorithms are not extremely biased towards censorship, then the reason that memes succeeds is because they're memetically shareable. And that will be the same with stories. If somebody comes up using OpenAI and comes up with some beautiful, resonant, universally insightful story using OpenAI and it spreads like wildfire through the internet, then it doesn't matter that there could have been a million other crap stories being generated because they wouldn't float to the surface. So I think we're going to see more content than we've ever seen before behind the scenes. But the market is going to preselect those that actually matter. It's like with movies, there are – I don't know how many movies there are in existence, but, you know, I could name some obscure movie that only one in 10,000 people have seen because it sucks. But then if I say Jurassic Park, the whole world knows what that is because the market rose it to the top over time, across demographics, across cultures. And it maintained its place because of its excellence. So as long as the creatives are channeling excellence in whatever process they feed the AI, then the AI will feed something back that resonates. So it's just going to be an act of – it becoming a new poetic canvas. I think either that or enslaves us and sends us into human batteries.
Jacob
One of the two, we’ll see what happens. With that, with the marketing filtering the best to the top – what do you think allows something to filter to the top because I think you often hear people talk about a movie they watch that's so good that no one else has ever seen. But if they think it's so good, why has nobody else seen it? Is it that artists think in a mindset that's not applicable to reaching a mass scale? Or what's preventing some of those really, really good stories or really, really good movies from actually filtering through?
Mike
I think sometimes it's as simple as that films are ahead of their time, that they are preempting a pattern that’s, like a wave that hasn't yet hit the shore. It's like when there's a tsunami, right? Wildlife runs into the center of an island minutes before the wave is even visible on the horizon because they sense something that's coming. And I think that's what artists do, like great artists. So they sense a cultural shift and they make something. And then a handful of other people recognize and feel that thing. But most of the world doesn't even yet know there's a wave heading to the shore. So I think that if something's truly great it may not rise to the surface immediately because it's just ahead of its time. I mean, the original Blade Runner was like that. It completely tanked at the box office. There are lots of films that tank at the box office. They just don't hit any resonance. And then they go to DVD and then they suddenly accrue this massive, you know, like fan base over time that's like solid, you know, that's like, that's extreme, the foundation becomes powerful. And some of that is simply down to the format as well – one of the reasons that DVDs were such a useful component of the film industry is that they offered a chance of revenues for films that didn't necessarily become successful in the box office. But because now DVDs have been replaced by streaming, film studios are far less willing to take risks with things they don't think are going to succeed because the streaming revenue that they will generate off the back end once it leaves cinemas is very, very small, so they can't afford to not play paint by numbers, basically. So no executive’s going to take a risk because if it doesn't hit that peak kind of saturation at the box office in the opening couple of weeks, it will never make money back because when it goes onto streaming, streaming doesn't generate enough of a yield to cover the costs. So that’s another reason that we're moving into this space where zero risk means highly marketed sequels, but I think that the actual monetization of films is going to change in the next few years as well, because I think that we're going to start to see different payment methods start to play a factor into streaming. I don’t know if you're familiar with the Bitcoin Lightning Network where certain platforms now pay as you stream and it's a relatively small amount to an individual, but if you manage to win the hearts of a billion people and they're all streaming Sats (editor's note: Sat = smallest denomination of a bitcoin) to you, you're going to make your money. And the actual process of paying the Sats is how you get the data. So it's a very self-contained model of distribution. So I think that's a very outlandish prediction. But I think that's why we're going. There won't be production houses, marketing and distribution platforms anymore. It will be far more like YouTube where you just log in, you watch what you like. And the act of watching automatically distributes a very small amount of your value to the creators.
Jacob
Which is exciting because to your point with these formulaic movies that we're getting over and over again, to de-risk, which has led us to the place where we're not getting art, that really resonates. And I recently wrote an essay about what makes art that stands the test of time. And to me it's the people that do take those risks that try to give you what you don't even know you want yet. And it might not even work in the moment to your point, like Blade Runner, because you can't tell what a classic is in the moment. You need time in order to determine whether something is a classic. But I think part of being able to create that requires intuition. And you talked about Rick Rubin earlier, and that’s what artists go to him for is his intuition. And I think that's what's going to separate artists using AI is their intuition. Because AI levels the playing field in a lot of contexts so being able to figure out what to give to AI to the market that they don’t even know they want yet is going to be a massive skill. Can you train that intuition or is that just something innate that you're born with?
Mike
I think it's a combination of the two. I think that I've seen evidence of people that have – when I was learning to become an artist, I was just by good fortune, I was always, as a kid, very capable of drawing pictures. And I just got better at it, partly because when you're good at something, when you're young, you get rewarded for doing it. It makes you feel good. So you continue doing it. So it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling ego cycle. But I've also seen while I was learning on like forums because I was self-taught to become a digital artist when I was watching the forums where people were coming on and learning from each other, I have seen countless examples of people who were utterly incapable of drawing the most basic things, and then you you check back in a few years later and the development is just ridiculous that the discipline and the commitment has allowed them to reinforce knowledge. And the reinforcement of that knowledge becomes the, let's say, I think intuition needs to be – it comes from somewhere. And people that are intuitive almost have an antennae which is more finely tuned. And I think that the actual attunement of intuition is part of that, is discipline and craft. So the more you become, the more you compound your knowledge on something, the more intuition can flow through it like electricity. It’s almost like you're winding a metal cable and once you've wound a very high tension cable through craft and discipline, when it touches some voltage from the unconscious, it streams straight through your hands, you know, which is what they call flow state, right? When artists are in flow state, they've mastered the craft. You’re in flow state when you type on a keyboard. You know, when you first try to use a keyboard, you use one finger, a few years go by, you're able to, you know, whiz through an email without thinking about it. And the act of taking that cognitive task out of your conscious mind and bringing it into the unconscious means that there's less levels of resistance between what you're doing in the moment and what wants to bubble up. So I would say that some people are born with very strong natural abilities, which makes them more intuitive. I don't think that intuition is some sort of genetic predetermined thing. I think that people who commit to their craft, are disciplined and open minded and curious and committed, the more they work at what they do and the more they have an expertise in something, the more they are enabling themselves to channel that voltage which comes from – who knows where it comes from? No one knows where intuition comes from. Albert Einstein didn't know where the intuition of his theories came from when it just popped into his head on a train in Vienna. You know, he's not the source of the intuition. He's just a conduit.
Jacob
Do you think part of intuition, on top of being a craftsman and doing the work and just getting better also comes with studying the past? To your point, everything works in cycles.
Mike
Absolutely. There's without a doubt I can say that the most important knowledge that I employ in the modern, let's say, field of games and film, the most important fundamentals that I use on a daily basis are all classical concepts. They're not the latest software gimmicks, if you want to look into the future, you've got to look further into the past, because we do move in cycles. The world is fractal. It repeats itself because of lost knowledge. People that study the classics and really become an expert in the classics and how they work will have a far more significant edge in the future than the people that have just watched the latest Star Wars movie and because they enjoyed it and then went and started writing stories about Wookies and people on spaceships. That's why George Lucas could make the original Star Wars is because he studied the anthropological texts of Joseph Campbell and Joseph Campbell was studying human history over thousands of years across the whole planet and distilled it. And George Lucas was learning from that. So Star Wars as a futuristic science fiction was the result of deep historical study. So yeah, that's definitely critical.
Jacob
And you’ve mentioned Joseph Campbell a few times here. You've mentioned the monomyth. For those that are unfamiliar, how would you simplify what the monomyth is?
Mike
So the monomyth was a let's say you could call it a theory, but it would be better to call it an observation. There was a guy called Joseph Campbell. He was a cultural anthropologist, which means that he was like an archeologist for human psychology across time. And he was fascinated by how there were parallels between the stories of, say, the Christian Bible and then the Navajo Indians. He was raised in America, and then he went and studied, traveled the world, which like Papua New Guinea, he went to South Africa, went to the Inuits, and basically started to catalog all of their myths, and he eventually realized that all the myths might have slightly different labels or they might have slightly different variations in the dynamics. But ultimately the dynamics of these stories were all basically the same. Like every tribe, disconnected from time and space, was generating something akin to the story of great sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and he distilled it all down. And once he distilled down all these various clouds of knowledge. He just sort of began to work out that there's actually a kind of model which he called the monomyth, which is effectively a 16 stage circle. In the 16 stage circle, if you really distill it down, you realize that it's effectively just a metaphysical distillation of all psychological change. So you start in a certain position in the ordinary world, you're confronted with the fact that you need something in order to make your suffering less. You go on a journey into the world of the unknown. You search, you find something, you take it, you return to the normal world, and you’re change. And that's the simplest model that I can think of to describe it. So there's you. You need something. You go, you search, you find, you take, you've returned. That's the building block of the hero's journey. But how it expresses itself has got infinite permutations because every single person has different interpretations, has very peculiar needs and journeys and contexts in which they travel through life. So one person's need is different to another's. But ultimately that metaphysical skeleton underpins all of evolution, and that's why it's the building block that you can use as a framework for making stories – if your story respects that natural cognitive tendency of us to see the world in that cycle. And if a story respects that cycle and it's scary because every Hollywood movie that's been successful, every single one of them, you can basically show that despite all the idiosyncrasies, there's a consistent structure underneath, a skeleton that Joseph Campbell called the monomyth.
Jacob
And then that plays into the subconscious, right? Because if everyone's studying these traditional stories, the format of the future stories are going to be modeled after the monomyth. And as viewers, we're so used to seeing stories in that structure that subconsciously it feels good to us when something does follow that structure.
Mike
Yes, when it's there, it clicks. It's like giving you an example because it sounds reductive, right? It sounds like, oh, well, every story can't be the same because that would be a very violent reduction of what you see to be a very vibrant world. But to give you some context, like every person that you've ever met has a consistent structure of a face, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. That consistency in the structure is what allows for expression. You don't go up to somebody you know, you've met 10,000 people in your life. You don't walk up to the 10,000th person you've met and go, You know what? I'm getting really bored of this facial construction that you’re using here. Like you just don't do that. It's a prerequisite for communication, and for value expression. So those people that understand that will be able to harness that structure to express something meaningful. Ultimately, you can look at the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Shawshank Redemption, Die Hard, you know, Jerry Maguire. It doesn't matter. They all follow that pattern and when they follow, it just clicks and we resonate with it. It makes us feel a combination of humble and hopeful because you see problems that people are going through, you see the challenges they face and it becomes a source of inspiration for your own life. And that's the reason that it exists, is that it allows us to pass on that model across generations.
Jacob
Is there a time and place when you should deviate from that structure?
Mike
You can totally deviate, you can break structure. That's what, you know, Picasso did like he learned this craft of painting, but then he basically became against structure in some sense, or he broke structures. And that's what a lot of, you know, indie movies do to some degree. But ultimately, if you stray too far from structure, you end up with noise. So, you know, for example, Tarantino is a great example like Pulp Fiction – classic hero’s journey. What’s he done? The same thing that Nolan does when he chops up his timeline, he breaks apart the sequentiality so you have to put it together for yourself. But when you actually look at the individual stories inside of Pulp Fiction, and you line them back up you'll see the classic structure. There's you, you need something, you go, you search, you find, you take, you return, you’ve changed. Take Bruce Willis' character, Butch. He starts in a pickle. He's been asked to throw a fight, which is against his moral principles. He needs to not do that. So he chooses to effectively betray Marcellus Wallace. He then goes and then he realizes that he can't escape without getting his gold watch, because his gold watch represents his integrity and his father's heritage, etc. So he goes, he finds it, he takes it, gets raped in a dungeon or comes close enough to it. And then he's returned changed. And at the end of the story, you get what's called atonement, which is at the beginning of the story, there's this issue of integrity and conflict between him and Marcellus Wallace and then at the end, there's atonement. And both characters have changed from that journey, and both of them have either reintegrated or integrated new values. It reintegrated old values such as the Gold Watch, which is Butch’s father's war watch and Marcellus Wallace is integrated into a new level of respect because at the beginning of the story he sees, Butch is basically just a joke that he can just buy out. So once you actually look at these patterns, Tarantino understands what's going on. He just has a very strong talent for obfuscating some of that architecture so that you don't feel like you're being hit over the head with it. And that's what storytelling is, is finding new ways to say old things. You know, Nolan obviously does that very, very well because he breaks apart the sequentiality and the temporality of the stories. But ultimately the hero's journeys.
Jacob
And what's important to and like even relating back to Picasso is you have to learn the structure first before you can break it. It's like some people when they start out, they think “Oh, well, you can break the structure, so I'm going to”. But you don't even know when and why you should be breaking that structure. And so as an artist, you can almost get too far into the mind of an artist where you think that you always know best and you can just trust your intuition in every context and you'll be right. But I think that can almost lead you to a place where you're creating stories that aren't – I don't know if commercially viable is the right term, but you have to think about the end consumer to some degree while you're creating.
Mike
Yeah, well, absolutely. It's like if you think that you're an amazing sculptor that can make a beautiful portrait of a person, but you've never actually taken the time to understand what a person looks like and you put an eyeball in the back of the neck and you put a nose on the top of the head and you break all those things. Sure, it might be interesting to look at for like a minute. You might be less interested in juxtaposition of facial features on a skull. But then if you say, well, now I want the skull to communicate what's going to happen? Nothing. Noise, It's going to be incomprehensible. So a lot of people believe that breaking things is a sign of creativity. But when all it actually does is just completely tie their hands behind their back when they want to actually communicate something with signal because they've broken everything, it's all noise. There's no way that they can express anything anymore, apart from a brief, maybe brief discomfort because you've just damaged everything. But that's what art is meant to do. Art is meant to challenge. You know, expressionistic art is meant to challenge your perceptions and your preconceptions, and storytelling does that. But if you exclusively aim to be disruptive and to be counter like, what's the word like counter culture or whatever, you eventually end up with something which doesn't say anything at all. So it's a balancing act. You can't go too far out before it becomes unrecognizable as art.
Jacob
And I think right now in terms of like, especially mainstream art, we've gone too far in the other direction where it's entirely distribution focused, quantitative metrics and I think we need to find that middle ground. And hopefully that's what comes out of this renaissance you've been talking about.
Mike
Yeah, it's coming. It's coming. Because keep in mind within the industry, there's a lot of people there's almost like, I wouldn't know how to make a clear categorization of the people that are in the industry. But let's just say there's two types of people. There's bureaucrats and administrators who are in it for the money that are capable of doing a good job as administrators, which is just, you know, like making things work, booking travel, booking logistics for things like getting the equipment to places. Then there are creatives who are people who are, you know, relatively creative, but not necessarily visionaries who are almost like they're being milked for their capabilities. And then there are a few people. It is a minority, but it's a powerful minority of people who are extremely talented, who are hitting their head against a brick wall because this system is so lacking in vision and the only reason that those people aren't recognized or capable of making a difference is just because there is so much bloated bureaucracy that people that want change just get weaseled out because the bureaucracy in the middle management don't want anyone rocking the boat because it's pretty sweet what they get. They get their big bonuses, they get their salary, the majority of people in the film history aren't in it for film, they're in it because of the paycheck and ultimately when there's no longer money coming into the studio those people who are basically fat are the first to go. So the renaissance comes ultimately when all of the let's say, the human fat of an organization gets cut off and then suddenly there's a new capability of the most creative and driven and passionate people to communicate. And then, of course, they do need some management, but you can't just have creatives just running rampant. They need to be managed and to be structured. The problem is that when the management in the structure becomes 90% of the organization, it just becomes a behemoth, which is what Disney is. And then throw into that the extra addition of political ideology and policies that makes even getting the most simple product out without butchering it impossible. As we see with all of these, you know, rewrites of loved stories with completely new agenda driven storylines that no one wants, apart from the most extremely politically, ideologically possessed people at the heart of those industries. So all it takes is a handful of very woke people at the heart of Disney to suddenly have a completely outweighed influence on a product that then gets exported to billions of people that don't share that political ideology. And that's what I think is happening now at Disney, is that go woke, go broke and that's definitely happening 100% because the company can't afford to continue doing this political nonsense.
Jacob
It's listening to the vocal minority which is not leading to them creating things for the silent majority.
Mike
Well, here's the thing about vocal minorities, right? Is vocal minorities are very interesting when they actually have something to say, which is against the grain, which is revolutionary or interesting against the opinions of the majority. And what's happening with these vocal minorities at the moment is they have a very predictable, non original set of ideas, but they're talking about it as if it's some sort of a revelation that the rest of the world doesn't doesn't understand the idea about. So the minorities are protected by the corporations at this point, when I say minority, I don’t mean racial minorities or people who are actually being oppressed by some level, I just mean some ideologically possessed person with communistic tendencies gets into the heart of Disney and likes to draw pictures and complain about gender politics. Well the corporation is incentivized by various monetary powers to protect and broadcast that particular set of people's views. But it runs antithetical to the majority of people that just want to get on with their lives without being accused of systemic racism or being, you know, some bloody white supremacist or whatever. The politics now, the gender politics and the racial politics, they are now generating the animosity that they were supposed to actually nullify. And because it gets corporate backing, it gets disproportionate voice in the final product. And then the final product disproportionately turns off the majority of people. So it's quite complicated in terms of just how bizarre the relationship is between these political ideologies and the funding that comes from on high with various taint. So, you know, looking at the monetary and financial side of the film industry is also extremely interesting, let's put it that way, because we have a lot of money coming in from very a handful of very, very, very large asset managers like BlackRock that have a very specific set of agendas that they want to to put into the products. And the products won't even get seen in the market unless they carry a certain message. So that's why we're seeing such bizarre choices in a lot of the creative output of studios as well, is they're actually being put under pressure to create effectively some form of cultural programing or cultural ideology that isn't grassroots. It isn't coming from below through the creatives and the individuals. It's coming from above through the bureaucracy.
Jacob
Which is so interesting. I work in marketing, I've worked at influencer marketing for a long time and this is a different level to a problem that's at this influencer marketing level where brands will come in and try and tell the creators how to do the advertisements that they're paying them to do. And then as a result, the advertisements don't do well because the people watching know that it's not a genuine message. Creators are being forced to say certain things and the ad doesn't work. It's the same thing here on a different level where you're being forced to put something in films that the people don't want, the film won't work and your message won't get out anyways. So you have to empower the creators because they know how to speak to the population.
Mike
And you can see that the box office speaks for itself. So in the same weekend, Pixar's Lightyear came out and Paramount's Top Gun Maverick came out. Lightyear, celebrated the fact that it was basically just using a loved franchise to beat people over the head with a set of political sort of statements and gender statements and, you know, it's Lightyear and it’s about, you know, lesbian and bisexual relations or whatever. So, yeah, believe it or not, people don't need to be anti something in order to just not resonate with it. And then at the same time you've got Top Gun Maverick coming out where Tom Cruise and Skydance and Paramount were very meticulous and deliberate to not put any politics in that movie. Now, if you look at that movie, they don't even name the country in which that final mission takes place. It is completely devoid of political statement, it’s completely devoid of gender ideology projection. It's classic eighties values, basically. And the free market completely neglected and did not want to buy tickets to Lightyear and the free market really wanted to watch Top Gun Maverick. And I think that what we're actually seeing now is that the main problem with film studios and the streaming model right now is that a lot of these streaming companies – they make money, but they're actually subsidized. So think about it this way. Imagine that you've got Netflix and you've got millions of subscribers and that's all well and good. But the majority shareholder of Netflix and the person that owns the biggest shares in Netflix is BlackRock. And they're actually paying for you to fail. So if you lose subscribers BlackRock doesn't mind because they're going to give you money to keep the operation going even though you're slowly bleeding your subscriber base and eventually you get to a point where BlackRock doesn't want Netflix anymore because after bleeding them dry of subscribers by forcing Netflix to make horrific material that no one wants to watch and therefore unsubscribes from, eventually they leave. Netflix is just a broken husk of a platform that has alienated all of its original users. And that's what's happening right now with a lot of these platforms. And every time now a classical value film comes out that just does it simple and well. Top Gun Maverick was not exactly Citizen Kane, but it broke the billion dollar box office in the first weekend, I think. So now I think a lot of people in Hollywood are now realizing that while it was very fashionable and trendy and looked good on the awards ceremony staged to broadcast your political views because it made you feel like you were fighting for freedom despite the fact that you're a multi-million dollar film executive, they’re now realizing that that that social grandstanding and virtue grandstanding is ultimately going to put them into poverty. And it's amazing how quickly the executive producers will change direction when they're faced with the possibility of losing money.
Jacob
And I think that there is room for those stories. But I think your point, like with Lightyear and now I haven't seen it, so this may be a bad take. I think that to your point, if you have a message in there, that's fine. But you want the story to come before the message. But right now the message is usurping the story. And it's almost like they’re crow barring their message into the story. Kind of like you talk about with Star Wars, there's a scene that an executive liked in the original that they want to make sure it is in the new one. You have to make sure that everything you're putting in there is in service of the story. And it feels like there's too many things that writers and directors have to try and find a way to incorporate into their films that don't service the story.
Mike
And the story is ultimately like when we say service the story it's kind of a weird thing to say because it's all why are we servicing the story? We should be servicing the audience. So when we say servicing the story, what we actually should be saying is, well, we're servicing the collective and individual psyche of our audience. And there are some things which collectively bond us together. And the story will resonate with that. And there are some things which are idiosyncratic in each of us, and the story should reflect that as well, which is why the greatest stories all have a polysemic nature. Polysemic means you can read them in one way or another. So they have subtext. So stories that ostensibly, like Jurassic Park, ostensibly is a story about a theme park of dinosaurs. Sure, that's the text. You know what if we could create dinosaurs. But the subtext of that story is established in the very opening scene with with Alan and Ellie, where after he attacks that kid looking at the velociraptor bones as they're walking up the hill, Ellie says to Alan, “you know, if you wanted to scare the kid, you could have pulled a gun on him”. And he's like, “Yeah, I know, kids like you want to have one of those?” So what does that mean? It means these two people are having a conflict over what they're going to do with the future of their relationship in regards to having family and kids. Go to Jurassic Park, what happens immediately when they arrive? Grandkids of John Hammond arrive and become surrogate children. The subtext isn't about what if we could clown dinosaurs. It is, what if we had children? And then the backdrop of Jurassic Park simply becomes a canvas upon which to paint that very familiar set of problems of parental responsibility, maternal and paternal responsibility, relationship to kids, relationship to the responsibility for life. So that's where great storytellers like Spielberg are servicing the subtext of what the psyche of the audience wants to digest. Whereas people that use policy driven, let's call it propaganda, don't say let’s have subtext about inclusivity. They say, let's write on the very surface of our script that we're going to tell the audience that they're not being inclusive enough. And that's where you get these people feeling manipulated. And when people feel manipulated, they don't buy tickets, They don't want to be schooled. They don’t want to be preached at. They just want to be feeling like they're actually participating in something without being manipulated, which is what these other stories fail to do now, because they're so politically driven.
Jacob
They lack subtext, which speaks to the subconscious. And what makes good stories, as we've talked about, is the subconscious.
Mike
Exactly.