A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer & Charles Fishman

Author:Brian Grazer & Charles Fishman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-04-06T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Good Taste and the Power of Anti-Curiosity

* * *

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.”

—Carl Sagan1

THE MOVIES WE’VE MADE AT Imagine have a great variety of settings, stories, and tones.

We made a movie about achieving the American dream—and the central character was a semiliterate African American man trying to climb the ladder of the heroin trade in New York City in the 1970s. That movie, American Gangster, is also about the values of American capitalism.

We made a movie about the power and the passion of high school football in rural Texas. It’s a movie about how boys grow up, how they discover who they really are; it’s about teamwork and community and identity. It’s also about disappointment, because at the climax of Friday Night Lights, the Permian High Panthers lose their big game.

We made a movie called 8 Mile about a hip-hop artist—a white hip-hop artist.

We made a movie about the movie Deep Throat, and how that pornographic film about oral sex came to define a critical moment in our culture.

We made a movie about a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician—but A Beautiful Mind is really about what it’s like to be mentally ill, to be schizophrenic, and to try to function in the world anyway.

Two things are true about all these movies.

First, they are all about developing character, about discovering flaws and strengths, and overcoming your emotional injuries to become a full person. To me, the American dream is about overcoming obstacles—the circumstances of your birth, a limited education, the way other people perceive you, something inside your own head. Overcoming obstacles is itself an art form. So if the movies I make have a single theme, it is how to leverage your limits into success.

Second, no one in Hollywood really wanted to do any of them.

I’ve talked about using curiosity to get around the “no” that is so common in Hollywood and at work in general. The first reaction to most ideas that are a little outside the mainstream is discomfort, and the first reaction to discomfort is to say “no.”

Why are we glorifying a heroin dealer?2

Shouldn’t the football team win the big game?

Who wants to watch a whole movie about a struggling white hip-hop artist?

For me, curiosity helps find ideas that are edgy and different and interesting. Curiosity provides the wide range of experience and understanding of popular culture that gives me an instinct of when something new might resonate. And curiosity gives me courage, the courage to have confidence in those interesting ideas, even if they aren’t popular ideas.

Sometimes you don’t just want to attract the crowd to something mainstream, you want to create the crowd for something unconventional.

I like projects with soul—stories and characters with heart. I like to believe in something. I like the idea of the popular iconoclast—doing work that is at the edge, but not too far over the edge.

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