Hello, welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many
levels of zoom, from thoughtful detail through to transformation in
organizations, society, and the world.
My name is Andy Polaine.
I'm a design leadership coach, service design and innovation
consultant, educator, and writer.
My guest today is Julian Simpson, a London based writer and director
who has worked in film, TV, and audio for the past 25 years.
He made his directorial debut annoyingly young in his mid twenties with The
Criminal, and more recently worked on Spooks, New Tricks, Doctor Who, and more.
He created the Lovecraft Investigations, the Aldrich Kemp audio series,
and the Pleasant Green Universe.
He runs a writer led company called StoryPunk, and writes an excellent
newsletter about the screenwriting life called Development Hell.
And as it happens, Julian and I went to school together and rediscovered
each other's work recently due to the magic of the interwebs.
Julian, welcome to Power of 10.
Thank you.
Nice to be here.
So I've wanted to have someone from film on here for a while, because as I
told you this, you know, I studied film, video, photography, and this newfangled
thing called digital interactive multimedia in the very early nineties.
And I didn't go on to be a film director is what I planned but you did and, and
to Christopher Nolan, who was at college with
Yes, that's right.
So he was in the other film course about two years ahead of
me and, you know, where is he now?
How, what happened to him?
So I, I listened to an interview with Christopher Nolan and I had this sort
of parallel universe that sort of, you know, sliding doors moment, like, yeah.
That could have been me but, you know, having moved into interactive media and
then digital broadly and design and so forth and then sort of in service design
and everything I do now, you know, that, that sort of film production model and
that kind of way of thinking about.
A very large group of people actually, sort of an interdisciplinary group of
people coming together to collaborate on something and, and the kind of process
that film has had, has behind it, which is relatively mature now, I'd say very
mature now, certainly compared to sort of, you know, anything digital, has
always fascinated me and it's stuck with me as, as a way of thinking about
groups of people working together.
So I'd kind of be really interested to, to chat to you about that, but I
guess, first of all, I'm interested to know your pathway to where you are now.
It's kind of weird and atypical probably.
I don't actually know what typical looks like.
I left school didn't go to university, got a crappy job in advertising
that actually, to be fair at the time, wasn't a crappy job.
It just feels like a crappy job now.
And then decided that I did want to go into film, which I kind of always
wanted to do, but didn't know how to.
Still didn't know how to, but figured I could write a short film and make that,
and that couldn't be too difficult.
So I wrote something.
And then put notices up at your film school, actually for crew ended up
getting a bunch of students in to crew this movie that was shooting that we
shot in the flat that I was living in did enroll at university to get the grant
money and the loan money to make the short film, but didn't actually turn up.
and ended up having, so our sound guy on that was a student at your place
called Asif Kapadia, who went on to make a movie called the warrior and
then more recently made the documentary Senna and Amy and a couple of others.
So he's like an Oscar winning documentary maker now, but he was
just the sound guy on our short film.
And very good at it.
Did that, that didn't go anywhere at all.
Decided to write a feature film which took about four or five years to get together.
Mostly through ignorance and stubbornness and not really understanding that
these things aren't meant to happen.
Made that, thought that was the ticket to everything.
Turned out not to be.
Had another film set up.
Um.
And kind of all ready to go with Hugh Jackman just before
the first X Men came out.
And we couldn't get the finance because no sales company in the world would
believe me when I said that Hugh Jackman was going to be a big deal.
yeah, well, you know, what happened to him?
exactly, exactly gone the way of Nolan and that was a weird one
because that was going to be Hugh Jackman and Courtney Love, which
was going to be quite an odd combo.
So that movie fell apart.
I went and worked, well, I did nothing for a while, went and
worked in television kind of worked my way up through television and
then moved into audio as well.
And now I kind of where I am now.
Right, right.
So what you just described, there's another podcast I
listened to called Script Notes.
I don't know if you do with John August and, Craig Mazin.
It's really brilliant.
It's, it's kind of, like you could skip film school and just listen to the whole
archive of that, I feel, one of the things that you just described there
is how incredibly precarious the whole kind of filmmaking process seems to be.
It seems to be, you know, for anything to even start to get made,
it seems to be to the stars, really, I'm literally the stars, right?
Really have to align.
Otherwise it just falls apart.
Is actually I presume is where Development Hell comes from.
I mean, there's
people what development is actually, cause they,
well, development is, I mean, I don't know if I know what development
is, and I'm not entirely sure that anyone knows what it is.
It's the bit that happens between having an idea and making something,
and it seems to be designed it.
How I've often described it is that you're in a boat, and you're setting off from
a dock, which is you having an idea, and you're sailing to a destination.
And it's a straight line, and it's not that, it needn't be that difficult except
that in the way there is a whirlpool, which is development, and if you get
sucked into it, you will just go, be in there forever, and you will never get out.
So there are people who, there are brilliant development people around
whose job it is to take your idea, help it get better, grow it, make it into
something, and send it on its way into production, but there are equally an
awful lot of people who whether they intended to do this or not not have become
perpetual development people so they don't know how to get something moving on.
They just know how to keep it going around and around and around and
kind of killing it with improvements.
and you see that a lot.
You, you end up, so development hell is exactly that.
You've got an idea.
You've, someone said we should develop this.
They've paid you some money and now.
They are never going to be satisfied with it.
It is always going to need another iteration before anyone else ever sees it.
And you are literally just in hell, kind of rolling this rock up the
hill to mix mythical metaphors.
And so, you know, is this, this has been around for quite a long
time, that, that kind of process.
You know, is it useful or is it, is it ripe for disruption as the you know,
our Silicon Valley friends might say,
It's ripe for disruption.
I mean, it's a tricky one because our Silicon Valley friends have
in fact tried to disrupt it.
Netflix came in.
Amazon came in and their initial thing seemed to be to not do development.
And that can go one of two ways.
Sometimes you can end up with a show like Going Back, something like The Wire, or
The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad, a show that is so authored and kind of idiosyncratic
to its creator that no amount of outside voices are going to improve it anyway,
so you just want to get it out there, and With all of its kind of rough
edges still intact because it's worth something, it's valuable in its own right.
But most of the time what happens is that you end up putting any old
crap on the air because there were some famous people attached to it and
you don't have a development team so you're like, Oh well if this actor
and this director and this writer are attached to it, I'm sure it's fine.
And you put it on the air and we've seen a lot of it.
Especially movies on the streamers, where they all feel like terrible
vanity projects because there wasn't the development process because
there wasn't anyone going, wait a second, this doesn't make sense.
So one of the things that, you know, is different between our, our two worlds
now is you know, this idea of kind of first copy costs, I guess which is.
I realized this far too late in my career, you know, I used to sort of make bespoke
digital things and try and send it to someone for as much as I possibly could.
And obviously the way to make loads of money is to make something that can be,
you know, repeated and duplicated and, and take a little bit of a lot of things.
But I think there's a thing there that, you know, one of the shifts towards as
a software development and all the rest of it kind of ended up all being online.
And I'm of a, I'm of an age where I remember actually making software
that, you know, got burnt onto a CD and then pressed in the, you
know, tens or hundreds of thousands.
And if you screwed it up, then you, you screwed up hundreds of thousands of times.
But now, of course, you know, they're all shifted and so software gets released, you
know, Amazon famously started releasing, you know, new updates every few minutes
and now it's like every few seconds.
I mean, it boggles the mind.
So the real idea is, you know, we're going to get that stuff out there and we'll
find out if we've got, you know, if we've made mistakes, we'll fix it afterwards.
And I guess there's a certain amount of that in film.
But one of the things that's always fascinating me about film and
particularly screenwriting actually, is that screenplays are sort of a, an
unusual writing medium in the sense that they're not really meant to
be read by the end audience, right?
There are kind of.
No, they're like an architectural blueprint,
Right, right.
Yeah.
It's the blueprint for the building.
It's not the
building itself.
Sort of makes the film though, as best they can in different formats.
So you, you will have, you've got your, I guess your treatment and outline.
You've got your screenplay, multiple drafts of, and then you've got
you know, people storyboarding.
Then you've got, and then finally.
You've got shooting it, which, which is, you know,
incredibly, incredibly expensive.
And now you've got post production, which is also now
incredibly, incredibly expensive.
I don't know if they're kind of, if those two have switched, switched
that post production is more expensive than the actual shoot these
it depends.
Weirdly enough, I was talking to a virtual production company
about an hour ago in Helsinki.
And they were talking about, they've got a big LED volume, like the kind
of things they shoot Star Wars and Star Wars TV shows and stuff on.
So it's an Unreal Engine feeding a 180 degree LED screen.
Yeah, we should probably just kind of describe what that is like for people.
Cause in case they, they don't know they are, they are, it's a, it's a
studio soundstage, but it is just got screens like wraparound screens
So yeah, so instead
and you can put anything
green behind it, where you'd ordinarily key in a scene or whatever, you know,
spaceship or whatever, you have an LED panel that goes all the way around, it's
huge, that shows you, as an actor, as a director, it shows you where you are.
It's the, it is the background, backdrop of the scene, but it
also responds to the camera.
So if the camera sees you, Changes aperture and changes its focal length,
then the background will blur accordingly.
So it feels like you're in a real place.
It doesn't always work.
And I think it's overused and kind of lazily used sometimes.
But the point was that these guys in Helsinki, they run this thing and
there's like eight of them and they all know how all of it works and they
run it and they do a really great job.
They do games, they do movies, they do all of this stuff.
You move that setup to L.
A.
And suddenly they're like a hundred people there who all need to be paid.
And the Finnish guys were basically going, it's just, you know, it's a
classic kind of Hollywood problem.
If there's just, they've employed, everybody paid everyone far too much
money and are now going, Oh, wow, virtual production's expensive, isn't it?
And it's like, well, you guys make everything expensive.
It's, it's actually, if people Google Mandalorian and cause that's the way
where I saw it first, I think yeah,
is the kind of famous one.
you'll
find it
it's used more and more and more now, and we're talking about doing a
movie with those guys and just doing, there's bits, you know, you can do,
it's much easier to do a car chase, for example, if you're, if you're shooting
it from inside the car, then your background being on an LED screen is
a lot cheaper than having it there for real, and also, and safer, obviously,
But also probably not noticeably an effect.
Yeah.
if you get it right
The camera, it moves.
That's the other thing is it kind of like a parallax thing.
The camera moves, or the background moves with the
with the camera
head has got a kind of movement track on it.
It's very cool.
I mean, it is an amazing thing to,
it's an amazing thing, but it's overused and so, you know, it, it becomes
something there was an Amazon show called Citadel, which was I think the
most expensive television show ever made largely because they made it decided they
didn't like it and then made it again.
from scratch.
And they shot the entire thing on one of these stages, even
where they didn't need to.
So you kind of end up with scenes in an office where you're like,
why does this office look weird?
And it's just because it's on a screen, but it didn't need to be.
Okay.
So where I was getting to with this though,
Sorry, I'm diverting you
no, and that's fine.
It's great.
But then you've got the edit, right?
And then the movie is sort of made all over again in the edit.
And but I guess you've been through all stages of, of this.
I'm assuming it's like everything else, what are, what would you say is the secret
of maintaining some kind of integrity of the thing from start to finish?
Because that must be a sort of really, I mean, I think Craig Mazin
just said, listen, you have to write the best script you possibly can.
Which is also, I mean, apart from your time, it's cheap
in terms of the production.
Right.
It is the cheapest
bit.
Kubrick always talked about this as one man plus typewriter is the place
where you want to be making mistakes because it's the cheapest part.
I think
it's interesting that Craig Mazin says that.
All writers go write the best
Writing's the most important stuff.
Yeah.
Writing is the most important thing.
You should talk to the makeup people, they have a different view.
But I think it's about intention.
I think that I always liken this to architecture, even though I know
absolutely nothing about architecture, but it strikes me that there's a
blueprint, and then you kind of build a model, and then you build the,
start to build the real thing, but then you have to paint it and finish
it and do all of this other stuff.
And,
I'm assuming that what you're trying to do throughout that process is maintain the
intention of this is a family home, this is an office for a tech company, you know
there is a building in Vienna that I was told about recently when I was over there,
there was a barracks where the entire process fell down, because at no point
from blueprint to finishing the building did anyone spot they'd forgotten toilets.
No.
Apparently, so this is like way back.
This is like 100 years ago or something.
But yeah.
But so I think it's about maintaining the intention.
So the thing that keeps you honest is what's the film about?
And I don't know how that translates to design in an obvious way.
But this right?
The best script you can is great.
But if you hand that great script to a terrible director,
They're going to screw it up.
Bad actors are going to screw it up.
Bad lighting is going to screw it up.
Loads of things can screw it up.
It is true that it's difficult to make a good film out of a bad script, but
it is not true that it's difficult to make a bad film out of a good script.
Yeah.
There's lots of opportunities to screw it up.
Oh, loads.
So many.
I I've seen what bad editing can do to great acting only takes getting
the scissors in and the wrong place to turn a very, a performance that was
great on the day into someone looking like an idiot in front of the camera.
So talking of which, there's a lot of trust, right?
I mean, actors often talk about trust and trusting the director.
They don't have any choice to be fair.
I mean, they have
you know, that's true.
What do they mean by, I mean, I've got an idea of what I think they mean by
that, but what do they mean by that?
they do mean, I mean, I think that when you hear the, the, that line in
interviews, it's tempting to think that they mean in the moment on the day, they
kind of don't, they mean that they're going to be there, or it's, I think what
they mean is they're going to be there.
They're going to do however many takes of a scene and some of those
takes will be good in their opinion.
Some will be bad in their opinion.
And they are trusting the director to know the difference between the two things.
They are trusting the director to agree with them about the difference between
the two things, which is not always what's going to happen, but they are trusting
the director that in the finished product, which they have no influence over beyond.
standing on the set.
You go through the edit, you go through the music, you go through
the grade, you go through sound mixing and all of that stuff.
They come out the other end, they're trusting that you will
have protected their performance and not let them look stupid.
And they're also, there is an element of trust on the day in terms
of what you're asking them to do.
They have to trust.
You know, you go, there's going to be a dinosaur there.
So you've got a, you know, and it's going to be this big.
And it's like, so they're trusting you to, to, deliver on what you're promising and
to, and to take care of their performance.
Most interesting example of this, which no one ever spots, but
I find it really interesting.
And it was apparent most recently in Masters of the Air, the HBO, I think
it's HBO, the world war two flying show you have scenes on runways.
In that show and in the background of the run on the runway, there
are World War Two planes with their propellers spinning up taxiing around,
you know, big flying fortresses now.
Obviously on the day you can't have that because you're recording dialogue.
So those planes are probably their propellers aren't moving or they're
being towed quietly or whatever's happening, but they're not loud.
Hmm.
And so As the director, you're saying to the actors, you have to pitch way
up because on the day when this is out there, there'll be a gigantic plane
making a load of noise behind you.
You would have to shout over it.
Even though that noise isn't there now, we still need you to shout over it.
It's very difficult for actors to shout.
Louder than they need to to project if they're in a group
and one person isn't if one
person doesn't do it.
Everyone feel self conscious and brings himself down and, the trust.
So there are scenes in I'm not going to name actors names, but there are scenes
in Masters of the Air where there's one actor who isn't pitching up and three
actors who are and because that one actor wasn't pitching up, they've had to mix
the background lower so that he doesn't look weird and he happens to be the lead.
So the other three now look like shouty idiots because they're
shouting over no background.
So that's the trust.
It's about going.
I'm trusting you to not let that happen.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess there's also the, the sort of emotional, I mean, there's a, there's
that scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now with Marty Sheen, where he kind of
punches the mirror and stuff and you know,
It's having a breakdown.
and yeah, yeah, yeah, he's actually having in real life, but it, you know, of, of
the director just kind of letting that go and letting an actor really kind of go
deep, I suppose is perhaps a way to say it and, and know that that is not going to.
Are you taking advantage of as well?
I don't, I'm not sure that that he wasn't taken advantage of,
and I haven't seen Hearts of Darkness for a
no, I know if you
sure that he knew they were filming, or was, you know, he seemed quite drunk,
well, I think it was one of those things where nobody said cut.
Right.
And, and, and so, you know, it wasn't very clear.
but it was the 70s, different rules.
yeah, it was a bunch of different rules.
So we talked also about it.
So you asked before you said this thing, I don't know how
that kind of parallels to design.
And
I think one of the things that happens a lot on, on design projects and
particularly kind of digital things, but also big service design things
and stuff is lots and lots of what's known as alignment meetings, lots
and lots of people having meetings where you'd have far fewer of them.
If, if enough senior people just went, sorry, I don't know.
I don't really understand what we're doing here.
What, what are we doing here?
What, what are you talking about?
And, but nobody does that.
And so everyone circles around like, You know, like dogs that are kind of deciding
whether they're going to fight or play
and, and then they sort of align and they go, okay, right.
This is what it's about.
And I think that's, that's one thing.
So a lot of that is, you know, there's a lot of corporate
jargon about how strategic vision statement and all of that stuff.
And everyone's like, you know what that means?
You know, what do they mean?
But there's also another thing I think in particular in the startup
world where we, we think this is, we think this is a thing, we think
this is an idea that has some kind of product market fit, but it's not.
But we're not really sure when you see it quite often, they'll launch something,
they'll launch a, you know, an MVP, minimum viable product, they'll launch
a kind of first version of something in that very sort of lean and agile
way, just to get something out there.
And then they realize, oh, they're kind of searching for it.
And, you know, I coach people in those environments and
you see it quite often where.
A platform or a digital product is trying to kind of find its, its niche,
trying to find what its purpose, right?
And the way they do it is to really just put something out there in the
world that doesn't really happen.
Or at least the thing that's put out in the world, presumably
is the screenplay, right?
well
or
is there, is there a sort of a stage in between, between
that where more stuff happens?
And people go, Oh, you know, actually, this isn't going to work.
so, no, well, the development process is a bit like that.
Increasingly we're being asked to produce decks for movies.
Which would be, I'm assuming, similar to design.
horrendous.
That sounds good.
It's like a massive shame
Well, it's got worse.
So I directors have always had to do what they call a director's vision, which
is a completely meaningless document that's given to people who might be
greenlighting the movie so that they can pretend to understand what's going on.
Exactly what you're talking about.
And that's kind of now morphed, used to write basically an essay about,
you know, your thoughts on the movie and how you were going to shoot it.
So it was absolutely nonsense, but everyone felt better for having read it.
Or not even for having read it for having, for knowing that it existed.
Now they're going, can we get a visual, like a deck of basically shots from
other movies that will give us an idea of what your movie is going to look like.
And again, it's nonsense.
But I recently.
Was told that the deck on a movie that we're putting together wasn't considered
kind of up to snuff by some of the people that had been looking at it.
So I was like, okay, well, show me, show me the decks that they like.
And I got sent some and it's interesting now because the deck
that we'd created was, was an accompaniment to the screenplay.
Here's the script.
Here's visual reference stuff make you feel like a sort of some swatches
that will make you feel, you know, designing and they and, and the decks
that I was being told were the, were the kind of the, the, the benchmark
for this now I was like, Oh, these aren't accompaniments to the script.
These are instead of the script.
Right.
These decks now have a few paragraphs on each page, or a few lines on each
page, telling them a story, so they don't have to read the script anymore.
No.
Okay.
They get a picture book, telling them what the story of the movie is, with
some pictures of some actors, and that's how they'll be making their decisions.
And, that's it.
I understand that these people think they're busy.
They're not, but I understand that they think they are.
And I understand that this seems like a good idea, but what's going to
happen is that you get further down the line, you end up in the edit.
You end up in the expensive bits.
We're shooting, we're editing, we're in post production.
And because those people have a say in the finished product, but
never read the script, you are going to start hearing, this isn't
what I thought it was going to be.
Right.
And it's like, well, no, because you looked at a picture
book and made a decision.
Is there a shift in the type of people who are, I guess you're talking about
the people who greenlighting a movie is basically saying yes to the budget, right?
So are these the are these, is there a shift in those kinds of people?
I mean, you talked about the kind of Silicon Valley folks moving in.
But is it just, I'm too busy to read this or, presumably because good
writing is part of the thing, right?
That if someone is looking for, can this person tell a story and are they
painting a picture in, in words in the descriptions and then they, are
they, you know, is the dialogue good?
I think that there's so you've got several stratus of folk in the film industry
and the tech people have moved in, but they've kind of moved in at the top.
So they're mostly not involved with what we're talking about earlier
with development, for example.
So the development people have basically been the development people, whoever
owns the studio, the development people, the development people, and
they tend to be, in my experience, the Hollywood guys are really good, right?
They, they get all the references.
They read stuff very quickly.
Their notes are astute.
They tend to be and this is not necessarily a popular thing to say
amongst writers, but I think they tend to be the smartest people in the room.
Often the development people.
The problem they have is that they answer to people who may not be
the smartest people in the room.
So the development person has gone.
I've taken your script.
I've got some notes with we're all working together in the same direction
and we think we've made it better.
And this is great.
And then their boss goes, Oh, by the way, now I need it to be a
comedy with a talking dog in it.
And they have to give that note back, so they seem like idiots.
But actually it's somewhere above them is an idiot.
And at the moment it's, we've gone away from comedies with talking dogs and
we're into, well, we had the tech guys came in, Netflix and Amazon came in and
they were going Netflix specifically.
We're going to disrupt
that whole thing was we're going to change how things are done.
We're fast.
We, you know, move fast and break things where the guys from Silicon Valley who
are going to transform the movie industry.
got all the data too, right?
Yeah, and specifically the television industry, we've got the
data, we know, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah,
good shows, because they didn't really get too involved with development and
stuff, they did make some good stuff.
And then they and then they slowly turned into movie studios because
they started to, go, well, hold on.
We need a movie star in this and we need an established writer or an established
director, and they basically became all of the, all of the obstacles to getting
a TV show or film made that previously previously existed, began to exist at
Netflix and, um, and got to the point now where they're going, what if we had
adverts and what if we didn't release stuff in box sets, but what if we released
shows weekly with commercials in them?
And it's like, well, congratulations.
You just invented network television.
I thought you would, I thought you're trying to do something different.
But the other thing that they do, which I might be to do with your
thing about kind of putting stuff out there and then seeing how it works.
They spent a lot more money than it needed to.
On a lot of things that throwing money at things was their
solution to a lot of problems.
It might change.
I mean, now that now that money is no longer free, you know I
think that's probably one of the things that's going on.
One of the things that's also interesting, I think is a reverse of this.
I've always, you know, there's this whole idea of lean, right.
And this idea that you can put the minimum, just enough in there you
know, out there, invest just enough to get something out there to test it.
And obviously film, particularly in the shooting moment, film
is kind of incredibly, fatty.
It's not lean at all.
You know, it's, it's, you, you shoot an enormous amount at great
expense with a lot of people over the course of, you know, days and weeks.
And most of it never ends up in the, in the final edit.
So you have, you know, I don't know what the shooting ratios used to be when
people were shooting on, on film film.
What, 10, 10 to one, 15 to one, something like that.
mean, depends on who the director was.
There's a great story I heard from a guy who was a driver who had driven
Hitchcock on one of his last films.
It was shooting over here, I think, at Pinewood and they wrapped on a Friday.
And he had to drive Hitchcock to the edit after wrap.
And it says Friday night and he said to him, Mr.
Hitchcock, when will the edit be finished?
And Hitchcock went, said Monday.
And the reason he said Monday is because he basically went, we take the
clapboards off, take the markers off the strip of film, stick them together.
We're done.
I don't shoot anything I don't want.
So, we select the best takes, but there's no shot, there was very
few shots in a Hitchcock movie that you don't, that weren't seen.
Yeah.
I've heard a similar thing about Clint Eastwood actually, as well, that,
Flint does the
has said that,
yeah, and John Huston used
I'm an actor, actor sort of went.
So, you know, maybe do a second take and it was just like, why would
you want to waste everyone's time?
No.
Okay.
All right.
There's some trust there.
So, but now, you know, and particularly, you know, with
digital everywhere, digital cameras everywhere, it's, it's enormous, right?
You were talking about Fincher, you know, you were talking about,
Fincher's on, I mean, 100 to 1 or something, is his shooting
ratio, he's often doing 100 takes?
I think
so that is, so that's takes or multiple cameras though, right?
Two.
So that's amounts of things that got shot compared to the,
the, the ratio I'm saying.
So a hundred to one is like, we shot a hundred minutes of something for
one minute or something that ended up
Yes.
And that just requires,
I mean, it's interesting.
I did hear on Finch's films that he uses the delete button on the camera.
Oh, yeah.
So he does go over and over again.
He'll do a hundred takes, but he doesn't keep a hundred takes.
If it's bad, he just deletes it.
That's, that's like a bunch of teenagers taking a selfie these days, isn't it?
Of like that kind of thing that shifted of people take a photo and then
immediately look at, look at it and then
Yeah.
can take another one.
Yeah.
But
he does that, it feels It feels quite final.
It feels quite extreme, but actually his editor probably doesn't want
to go through a hundred takes.
In the, it's like, that's a time consuming and expensive process.
If you know this take is bad, don't bother anyone with it.
Get rid of it.
I quite like that actually.
There's always a, there's an insurance thing.
There's always a kind of insecurity of going, but what if there was some nugget
in there that are, that I've missed.
And I think that there isn't just get, just chuck it, get rid of
it and work with what you've got.
It's fine.
yeah.
Yeah, I would like to turn to writing actually, because in your newsletter in
development hell you've written a couple of things recently but one was about
writing slowly and the other one was about sort of notes and outlines and The writing
slowly thing, well actually talking of a thing that I think everyone can relate to
that will be listening to this, you talk about the shared fiction of deadlines, and
I'm, I'm going to quote a bit, I'm going to sanitize the F word into something
Okay,
And we say, you know, we need to get the draft to Bob before he goes on holiday.
Screw Bob.
Bob's not sitting on a beach reading my script.
And more to the point, if that week Bob is spending in Maui is time I could
use to make the script better than double screw Bob and his pina colada.
I very, very much enjoyed that particular section of
I mean, I kind of assume it's weird, isn't it?
I assumed everyone else's deadlines were real.
No, no.
I've, I've always, not always, but I've realized at some point that this is just
made up cascade of kind of deadlines.
I mean, I think there are, you know, in film, if you're shooting and I've had,
I found this equally frustrating when I've been directing television shows
and Writers who may or may have the same attitude as me about deadlines, generally,
they'll go, you know, you go, I, but I, but we're shooting this tomorrow.
So if you're going to change it, it needs to be changed today.
And then they don't because they never hit deadlines.
And you're like, this is, this was a hard deadline.
This wasn't a fictional deadline.
We're literally standing on set with some actors.
But those are the only deadlines in film, I think, that mean anything.
Everything else is a shared fiction.
It's, it's probably done with the best of intentions oftentimes.
But it very often is, you know, this guy's going on holiday.
Can we get him the script before he goes?
And it's like, So
not, it's not going to read it on holiday.
No, I've heard all sorts of versions of that.
And I think there's also that cascading thing of someone, big boss says, you
know, I want to see this by the end of April and someone else, the next person
goes, okay, so we need this by mid April.
And the next person goes, right, we
check it.
before he
know?
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden said, no, we've got only two weeks to do this.
Are you sure big boss wants us to rush this in two weeks?
Yeah.
so I have a, a show with a streamer at the moment and we have quite a
few gatekeepers in between me and the kind of final decision guy and they're
all good gatekeepers, but they all, he's like, so when can I see a draft?
And you're like, I don't know, like four weeks or whatever it is.
And then as soon as he's off the call, other people are like, I
need to see it before he sees it.
And you're like, okay, so guys, you need to tell him it's going to be six weeks.
Because what I'm not doing is doing the work in half the time so that three
people can look at it before he sees it.
He's going to get it later because I'm going to take the same amount of
time over the work, and then you guys will want to see it before he does.
So you're eating into his time, not my time.
How does that work?
It has mixed Next results.
I mean, the thing is that ultimately, the thing I actually really like about
the US versus the UK is that if you within reason, if you go, this is
how long this work is going to take.
And the reason it's going to take that long is because I'm going
to do the best job I can with it.
Americans go with it.
We get it fine.
English people go.
No, I need it.
We still need it on Tuesday.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I mean, not all of them.
I mean, I just, you know,
Yeah, no, no, no, it's all right.
You know can write off my home country and you're one that
you currently still live in.
Britain's broken for a reason, you know, yeah, no, I know the notes and outlines
thing was interesting because as you know, I think, you know, I'm, I'm part of
this sort of, you know, the PKM, the sort of obsidian cult of people who kind of
I did not know,
this
digital, gardens thing.
Now I'm not, I'm not particularly as a personal knowledge management person.
I do use it cause I like to just have everything kind of one, one space.
I don't do a massive amount of kind of interlinking of all my notes and stuff.
And one of my previous guests, Jorge Arango, has written a whole book on this.
But I was interested because you, you describe, well, maybe you can talk
about that particular thing about sort of describing you sort of following
the process and then ditching it and kind of doing it differently.
well, the PKM process.
you were following the kind of notes and outlines and doing all of that stuff.
And then, and then you sort of ended up in this space where you're
like, Oh, hang on I'm just going to kind of write it all over again.
Oh, I think, yeah, I think I love the idea of planning and
it never quite works out for me.
And I always find that the process, the development process, I guess.
But the process of television and film always requires a plan.
They, they're like, you've told them the idea, and then they're like, great.
Can you now write that out in one page so that we can read it?
And show it to other people and then that they like that.
So they're like, great.
Now, can you write out in 10 pages, just expand and expand, expand until
the point that we get to a screenplay.
And I find that that process kills the creativity for me.
Because if I'm, if I've figured everything out before we start the
screenplay, I think the screenplay for me is a, is a process of kind of
exploration of an idea and of characters.
And if there's something to explore because we've mapped it all, then I
don't, I don't, personally, I don't really have very much interest in doing it.
And weirdly, it doesn't make it easier.
Does it just become typing?
I mean, I, I
becomes typing, but it becomes trying to fit...
because the menu is not the food, it's it's, I'm trying to find, it
works on paper, but when we start putting people in this scene and
get them to talk to each other, they don't seem to want to do the thing
we were hoping they were going to do.
And I can force them to do it, but it'll feel forced.
So you just touched on that thing that lots of writers talk about, and I,
I kind of know from a, a different, a different thing, actually from my,
from my D&D and from other things that I've written other, which is this
idea that I heard Ian McEwan talking about this actually, as well, that.
You have an idea for a scene and you obviously know the characters
that are going to be in that scene and you know whatever the tension or
opposition there usually is in a scene to set it up and give it its fuel.
But when you start writing the characters, these fictional people inside your
head seem to have a life of their own.
Is this a thing that is true
It is, but I think it's I love talking about it in those terms, but it's
kind of nonsense and it's sort of pretentious actually happens, I think,
is that you get into a sort of flow.
Where you've had the thousand foot view on it and you've gone.
This is what the scene is about.
This is where it starts.
This is where it ends.
Like you say, these are the conflicts.
These are the tensions between these characters.
And now I'm going to put them in this prison cell or in this police station
or up this mountain and I need them to get from A to B to C through this
scene and you start it and authors and writers will always go and then
the characters kind of take over.
What actually happens is you just get into the weeds of it
and you have a better idea.
A little thought in the back of your head's like, what if
they hit, what if he hit her?
What if this person jumped off this cliff?
What if this person turned out to not, not be who they thought,
who we thought they were?
You just have better ideas.
And it's the ideas that you get from being at kind of eye level with the
thing versus having the kind of, you know, the drone view of it, which
you had when you were outlining or planning or even just thinking about it.
And I was doing it this morning, I was writing, writing some stuff and
I planned it out quite meticulously.
It's a redraft.
I've even told this story a number of times before.
And yet, and I knew exactly where this scene ended.
And yet, that one line of dialogue occurred to me that changed something,
and then another thing happened, and then suddenly there was a different
character at the end of the scene, and I was like, this is how it should be.
But I couldn't have known that before it happened, but I don't think it's mystical.
I just think it's that your brain is going into a different gear and is pulling.
I'm going to use the PKM analogy a little bit, but it's pulling
all of the stuff, you know, in,
Yeah.
you know, it's going what is in the hovering around in the back of our
minds that we can suddenly find a link to and drag it into this scene
what suddenly what connection, what synaptic connection have we just made?
So this is the thing, and it goes back to that kind of process or the
planning thing you're talking about before that I think is really that kind
of reflective practice as Donald Schön described it where I think got lost.
Like in the design world, there's been this whole thing about design
thinking and, you know, this kind of separate bit of design.
And it sort of got morphed into this idea that we can do some design
thinking up front and then we just go on and kind of do the production
as if there's no thinking happening while you're actually doing the doing.
And I think one of the things, one of the things I really like
about writing is there's no second draft without the first draft.
You really kind of have to just go through that process and let yourself
write some junk and then, and then kind of go back and, and also that
kind of classic thing was by the time you got to the end of it, you, you
actually know what you're writing, you know, what it is you're writing about.
And then you sort of go back and fix
But isn't this a bit like design in terms of like, I've always imagined that if
you're talking about industrial design, if you're talking about factories,
that there must be a point at which thinking stops because you need the
widget to get designed to go through the production line in a particular way.
There is, and I think it's perhaps one of the differences between sort
of craft, if I sort of take like, I've got a little kind of handmade
cup, you know, espresso cup here.
And there's that thing where you're, you're making a thing with
your hands and you're getting that
So that's what I was going to say.
The kind of the artisanal, the kind of craft thing, which is kind of how
I think of what I do is exactly that.
It's like we can draw a table.
And we can, but then we get the wood and we start to do whatever you do, if
you're making a table with wood and, and it's going to direct us in a, in,
in perhaps a different way, or, or you're going to make a mistake and have
to course correct in a different way.
Yeah, no, I think there is definitely a you know, there's, there's quite a
lot of parallels there in, in design and certainly in, in digital, because
one of the things you you're doing is you make a thing, you might even test
it with real people, but certainly you make a thing and you're looking
at it as you're designing and going, Oh, actually, maybe not like that.
And there's a thing I call sort of designing yourself into a corner
where you have this utopian, well, it's actually more of a sort
of platonic ideal of something.
You know, this form of something in your head, and as soon as you make it
manifest as a tangible thing, whether that's in words or a sketch or something,
you're like, Oh, and now I see that that's never going to work at all, right?
I'm going to have to do that differently.
But because your brain leaves out all these kind of essential bits.
and
also because nothing's ever as good as the original idea.
no, no, exactly.
No, I, I used to love doing art at school actually.
And I used to love the kind of preliminary sketches or the bit of painting
where I'd done the sort of background
Yeah,
or wash.
And then I'd sketched out what the painting was going
to be, the outlines out of it.
And then I hated the rest because it only got worse after that, right
up until that point, it had all this potential for being this amazing thing.
And then I gradually just made it worse and worse and worse.
The
And I think that's what hap, I think that's what we're talking, that's the
process of filmmaking in a lot of ways.
So, there's this thing of, of people saying the script is written three times.
It's written in the screenplay, it's written in the shoot,
and it's written in the edit.
I don't think that's true, because the script in, certainly in an
ideal world, the shoot and the edit aren't starting from a blank page.
So it's not there, it's, it's, and it's not even a rewriting process,
it's a process of evolution.
And you stand on set.
With your script and your actors and they say the lines and you suddenly
go, Oh, I need that line of dialogue because You're doing it with a look.
I don't, I don't need that anymore.
So you can start to kind of scrub that out and then you get into the edit and
you're like, actually, you know what, they don't even need the look because we
can cut to that and then cut back to them and we can cut that look out completely.
And, and it's a process of refinement.
And I don't necessarily think it gets worse.
I definitely think the writing process is kind of what you're talking about
with painting, wherein you kind of go, I've got a great idea for a film, and
by the time you've written Fade Out, you're like, I hope people will still
work with me after they've read this.
Because that does get worse and worse and worse.
You just kind of go, I've got this great idea, and you walk around
with it for a while, and it's like, this is still brilliant.
I'm working on one at the moment, and I made the mistake of pitching
this, brilliant idea to a movie star's company and they then went to the
movie star and the movie star loved it and they came back and went we'd love
you to write this that he's really really excited about it and i was like
cool i'm super excited about it too.
Sat down, went right, what actually is it though?
I was like, Oh, it's one line, isn't it?
It's not an actual story.
It's not a thing.
And they're like, they're constantly going like, how's it going?
How's it going?
He's very excited to read it.
I'm like, what to tell you?
I hope, I hope they never watch or listen to this podcast now.
So, you know, we, there's so much we could talk about cause you've got
this whole audio thing that you do.
So I'm, I'm interested by the, the the turned to audio actually for you.
You know, is it simply that it's easier to get audio stuff made?
It's cheaper, presumably to, to make an
actually, it's a lot.
I don't actually, I don't have a terribly difficult time getting stuff
off the ground at BBC audio anymore.
Because I've won a couple of awards and they generally like me as long as I don't
try and do more than one thing a year.
They pretty much let me but getting other audio stuff off
the ground, it's very, very hard.
It's as hard to get finances, anything else, even though it's a smaller amount
of money, it's like a short film.
It doesn't get, there's no returns on it really.
So it's hard to kind of get going.
What I like about it.
Is that audio, the way we do it at least, is entirely artisanal, if
that's, if I'm saying that right when I write, so take for example Aldrich
Kemp, which third season of Aldrich Kemp, I'm writing at the moment I'm
on the third episode of five only the producer has read the first two episodes,
Radio 4 will never read the script.
They never even get sent it.
So, there's, it's a complete collaboration amongst equals who know
each other to get this thing right.
I can cast whoever I want, as long as we can afford them, whoever I like to do
what, and I can write whatever I like.
We then go on we don't go into a studio ever on these things.
We record on location.
So we then go to some kind of interesting place that will sound
like where it's meant to be.
With a bunch of actors who everyone gets on with each other.
We, you know, bring sandwiches is not an expensive production and we'll record and
you can record five episodes in five days.
It's really not a particularly long process.
The guy who recorded it is also the guy who edits it.
And the guy who does all the post production and sound mixing and stuff.
So he's there all the way through and he understands exactly what we're
going through at any given point.
And then I get it bounced back to me over and over and over again and he and I get
on zooms and we talk stuff through or I go to his place and we talk stuff through
and figure it out and figure out the music and all of that stuff and the end result
of what we do gets broadcast on Radio 4 without any interference whatsoever.
That's amazing.
So it's a beautifully kind of craft process that hasn't got any of the
guardrails or interference that you get from movies and television.
And why is that?
Is it sheerly, is it just because of the amount of money that
is not involved or is it, is
I actually think it's
you know,
I think it is because I think
it would be different like
radio.
we've sold, I've sold something recently to Audible that we'd already made.
And I really like the guys at Audible, but I get the impression if I was to
go to them and go, I've got an idea, it would be more like a TV or film process.
I think it's the BBC.
I think it's how they've always done it.
And there's, there's one pitfall to the entire process, which is
you get to do exactly what you want to do and no one will stop you.
There's lawyers,
there's a legal process
But you can, you can, you can drive it off a cliff
I can drive it off the cliff and they'll never hire me again.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, you know,
But that's quite, that, that is the risk I'm happy to take, you know,
because then it's your mistake.
Because other people in film and television, other people drive it
off the cliff and you get the blame.
So there's other people, you know, these days we're, we're in, there's a lot
of talk about is AI going to kill, can it film a TV and all the rest of it.
And there have been several attempts to get a chat GPT at Al
to kind of write a screenplay.
Okay.
And it's.
They're not
I'm pretty sure it already has and I'm pretty sure I've
seen some of those movies, but
Yeah, well, I mean this is the thing though, right, you know What will
it do it will kind of probably head towards kind of mediocre middle of a
sort of average screenplay based on thousands of other examples of movies,
but that kind of sounds like the Marvel universe to me anyway, right?
I
I wouldn't, I would never in a million years besmirch Marvel, but it's yeah, I
think that if, if, if the criticism of AI writing screenplays is it'll turn out
a bunch of mediocre rubbish that's based on a whole bunch of other things, then
there's definitely a huge market for it.
we're already there.
it'll be enormously successful.
It's, I use it.
I mean, I, I think someone much smarter than me said earlier, early
in the development of this stuff.
And it's, you know, the development's obviously very, very fast that before
you get replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by someone who can use AI.
And so I use it for research.
I use it for, you know, knocking things around and I find it helpful.
It's not that it can't write a screenplay.
It can certainly understand one.
I fed it a screenplay because I was looking for a one page pitch for something
I'd already written and I hate writing pitches after I've written the thing.
And I fed it a screenplay thinking it won't know what the hell it's looking at.
And it was like, boom, there's the one page.
I was like, Oh, that's pretty good.
You've missed a couple of points, but I can tidy that up in five minutes.
That's good to go.
But I think that it's like, it can paint pictures like with Dali and Mid Journey.
You can do, you can do paintings and I'm sure it can do design
and it can do a lot of things.
I don't.
doesn't have a sense of self.
It doesn't have a sense of an, a kind of an authorial voice.
It can copy one.
It's not genuine.
Yeah, it's an, it's an uncanny valley thing.
Yeah, yeah.
through history, the people that we've, the artists that we've admired, whether
they be novelists or screenwriters and directors or actors or painters,
they've all had their own kind of unique experience and point of view.
I think there may well be significant AIs that have a body of, that will have
a body of work that is interesting.
But I don't think that AI as a kind of melange can do that.
The bigger question for the human race at the moment, I'm writing a
film about AI, so I'm thinking about this quite a lot is why we are asking
AI to do things that we like doing.
First is getting it to do things that we don't want to do.
Why is it bothering to learn how to paint a picture if it
can't do my tax returns?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
No, it's well, it's to make kind of a bunch of people very wealthy.
No, I think there's There's a you know, very good questions around that It does
seem kind of rather strange that we end up humans end up doing the drudge work
and AI is doing all the stuff that was supposed to the artistic creative stuff
I thought
to free us to free our time up
I was promised was, you know, a universal basic income.
No one needs to work and you can spend your entire time
painting and reading books.
And it turns out that actually AI can do that, but we've got to carry on working.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, so look, we've come up to time, the the show is named after this film
by Ray and Charles Eames called Powers of Ten which is about the relative
size of things in the universe.
And I'm springing this on you, I've realized cause there's one, one
question at the end which is what one small thing is either overlooked
or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world.
don't know about an outsized effect.
But in my daily life, the thing that most grinds my gears, I don't know if this is
true where you are are black bin bags.
Okay.
Perfect.
I'll tell you why.
I can't fathom, I can't fathom why the bin bag that is the right size to fit
in our kitchen bin is not sufficiently strong to hold the contents of said bin.
Okay.
can't figure out why everyone's getting away with making crappy bin bags.
So that's, I bet it's not going to change the world.
I appreciate that.
It would change my,
I've, I've spilled, I've spilled my, the contents of my bin
enough over the over the years.
someone to come up with something.
Yeah, would be good.
Well, that'll do.
Oh, I tell you what I think I've just bought Hasselblad,
digital Hasselblad, the new
Oh, yeah.
And this is sort of shocking, actually, it's The thing that I didn't think I cared
about turned out to be one of the things that I really like about it, which is that
instead of using these, which I'm showing
Yeah, the SD cards.
Yeah.
SD cards, it's got internal SSD.
It's got an internal solid state drive of one terabyte.
All right.
And I don't know why every camera doesn't have that.
That's a very good question.
All right We will leave others to give us the answer to that one.
Where can people find you online?
They're used for defining on social media, but I think life's too short.
So, I am Development Hell at Substack, and CartoonGravity, all one word, dot
com, is my kind of scrapbook thinking space, you know, nonsense area.
That's pretty much it
i'll put some links to the Lovecraft Investigations, Pleasant Green your
imdb profile where you've got a very sort of Javier Bardem photo.
Yeah picture on there.
Yeah
Ah, yeah, I think that might be the one picture i've ever used
for anything when people go.
Do you have a picture?
I'm like, oh, yeah, there it is
Here's one for me 30 years ago
Exactly.
Julian, thank you so much for being my guest on Power of 10
Thank you very much
You have been watching and listening to Power of 10.
You can find more about the show on polaine.
com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice,
online courses, and sign up for my newsletter, which is very
irregular called Doctor's Note.
If you've got any thoughts, put them in the comments or get in touch.
You can find me as at a polaine on PKM dot social on mastodon.
You'll find me on LinkedIn and on my website as well.
All the links will be in the show notes.
Thanks for listening and see you next time.