Todd Komarnicki (Screenwriter)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work. Today's guest is Todd Komarnicki. He is a prolific screenwriter, best known for writing and producing the mammoth hits Sully and Elf. So we sat down and we talked about how he was able to get a rare laugh out of Clint Eastwood when they were making Sully together. We talked about why we should be questioning the langu language we use about losing our identities in Christ. And we talked about how we can all get better at receiving feedback on our work in order to pursue mastery of our crafts. Guys, I think you're going to enjoy this fun episode with my new friend, Todd Komarnicki. Todd, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jordan.

So recommended by former guest Scott Harrison. I know you know Scott's story quite well. What do you love most about the Scott Harrison Thirst story?

For me, it was a reminder of all the places that I had been personally rescued from. When I listened to the book for the first time on audio and I listened to Scott tell his own story, I just found myself sobbing throughout the experience because Even though I'm 10 years older than Scott, we walked the same streets. I wasn't a club promoter, but I certainly was living. Living a life not of my highest calling from my early years in New York and made a lot of bad decisions, decisions that hurt me, that hurt others, that were certainly going to be heartbreaking to my loving God. And I was rescued and protected somehow. And that is the story anyway, of the gospel, which is that God reaches in and rescues us from the life, whether we're the prodigal son or we only cheated cribbage. There's something fundamentally broken that needs to be healed and that comes through the rescuing love of Jesus Christ. So the Thirst story felt like everybody's story in the rescuing part. And then the specificity of New York really hit home.

Well, so there's a few people listening who are like, what are these guys talking about? So go back, listen to my episode with Scott Harrison, the founder and CEO of Water and Thirst is this extraordinary autobiography of Scott's life, but really the life of the organization as well. And I think I mentioned this on that episode. It's the only book I've ever cried reading. It was late at night. I'll never forget it. I was raising venture capital on the west coast in San Francisco. I was sitting in San Francisco International Airport. It must have been like 11:30 Pacific Time. And I'm an East coast guy, so I'm exhausted. And I'm just sitting there reading this book with this, like, terrible cheeseburger sitting next to me from the airport and just like weeping, bawling my eyes out over this incredible story. By the way, I read in your bio or something, you describing your conversion story as being, quote, spectacularly saved by Jesus Christ. What's the story there? I think you've alluded to it here, but what was going on there, Todd?

Well, that original rescue happened when I was in college. There's a rather deep dive, a little intense maybe for the listeners, but what it involves is deciding and planning and plotting the end of my life. So where God found me on the very edge of myself and on the very edge of something else that one could leap from. God literally grabbed me by the belt and kept me here. And not just once. Not just once. So I'm aware every day when I look at my wife and kids, when I breathe, when I taste even the worst cup of coffee, that it is a miracle to be here. So. And I know who's the one that saved me.

So this first experience is going back early in your life. You said high school, college.

That was college. I grew up in a Christian home, but in a similar way that Scott's story plays out, as soon as I left the home front, the faith quickly dissipated. And I don't know if that's everybody's story. I have two older sisters. It was the story for one of my sisters, but not for the other one. So there's certainly people that grow up in a Christian home. And I hope that's the case for my two kids who are growing up knowing about the love of Jesus, that can stay connected. But many of us, because we need to make our faith our own anyway, many of us have very hard road before we understand what it is to fall to your knees and surrender and really recognize that you need the Lord. For me, church or Bible Study or any of that stuff when I was a kid was just another competitive event. It was, you know, how fast could you go in? Bible drill. I had a huge wake up call one day my senior year of high school and this presaged me dumping my faith a year later. But we were coming back from church and I had the bulletin from church in my hand and. And it said 11 o' clock worship service. And I asked my parents, I can't believe I was this naive, but I said, why is it called a worship service? So here I'd been going to church my whole life and I didn't understand that we were supposed to be there to worship God, that we were supposed to, you know, I thought we were there to kill time before the NFL. Yeah, my faith was pretty thin before I went to college. And then everything fell apart and the rescue took place. It actually took me a long time to accept that God had saved my life. I was pretty grumpy about it for about a year. But the why is that?

Why is that?

I don't know. I think the darkness really wants to hang on to us when it has us. I'd been in the dark for so long and you get used to habits of thinking and also habits of viewing yourself. It's really hard to come face to face with the fact that Jesus died for you as an individual. It's an abstraction until you really receive it fully. And it takes a while. Took me a while.

There's also a lot of weight that's carried with that. Once that becomes personal, I lose myself to find myself. I lose my life. I lose my sense of. Of self. And I am hidden in Christ and everything becomes about Him. My whole life has to revolve around that person now. And that's a big. That's a, that's a gigantic leap for any person, especially a young person, to make.

Yeah. And I think the language of it is wrong. I think what it's missing there is the specificity of who we're supposed to be. The one Jordan, the one Todd of all time, that were handmade by God, that were knit together in our mother's womb. That all the love affair between God and the individual gets muted in this. I have to disappear into, be hidden. Yes, Hidden, but transformed from one degree of glory to another and made fully human, spiritually alive. Our puppy Maggie agrees with a righteous bark as she tries to get the volleyball.

That's amen.

Amen. Amen, Sister Maggie.

Yeah.

So we need to talk about how we talk about it to young People. Because when you're just finding your identity in the beginning and a number of people are telling you that you don't really have an identity, you just got to wrap up and join the team, that's not what's happening. It's the fullness of your identity. It's who you were really meant to be and not walk around spiritually dead while physically and emotionally alive.

So, yeah, no, it's good.

A lot of language. A lot of the language of the church needs a redo.

No doubt. It's one of the problems I have. Anytime I hear pastors talking about not making your work your identity, I understand what they're saying. I think what they're saying is don't make success your ultimate source of self worth. And. And I could celebrate that. Right. But to say that, like Todd, you don't. Being a screenwriter isn't a part of who you are is crazy. Of course it's a part of who you are. It's who God designed you to be. God designed me to be a writer. Right. Like, that is a core part of my identity. And I think we even see this with God himself in Genesis, right before he tells us that he is loving or holy, he says that he's a worker, a creator. Right. That is a part of his identity and our identity as his image bearers. Right. So, yeah, we got to talk about how we talk about these things. I like the way you put that.

And I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, I'm 56, so I think I finally started enjoying writing about seven years ago. So the bulk of my creative life, I didn't like doing it. And in fact, this will underline your previous point. My father's wisdom exactly articulated what you just mentioned. So 2006 or 2007, I'd had it with the movie business. It's a heartbreaking business, even in the best of times. And the fact that I was blessed enough to sell material but nothing was getting made had caused me to reach the end of my tether. My patience was gone for screenwriting and writing in general. I'd written three books by that time that had been published, but they hadn't sold well. And I just like, okay, listen, I'm running into a brick wall here, and obviously there's something else. I don't enjoy what I'm doing, and it's not bearing the fruit that I want. So therefore, it should be catapulted out of my life. So I said to my dad, we were in visiting, meeting up in London And I said, I poured out my heart to him, and he'd been a supporter of my dream. He and my mom had supported my dream from the beginning of wanting to be a writer when there was no proof that I could do it at all. So I thought this was a safe place to lay down my banner. And I said to my dad, listen, I feel like it's time to quit, and I'm done. And I'd like to talk to you about some other things that I might do with my life. Here I am in my. In my 30s, my late 30s, and my father went away for a couple days, and he came back and he sat down with me, and he said, I have an answer. I know how you're going to get through this patch, but you're not going to like my answer. And the answer is that you are going to write your way through it.

And I said, dad, you're write your way out. In the words of Hamilton.

I said, but that's the thing I'm not doing. I don't know if you noticed between the scones and the clotted cream that I was saying, no more writing. So, okay, you're right. That's wrong. Not writing. And he laughed. He said, todd, I've known you since the moment you poked your head into this world, and I'll tell you one thing I do know about you is you are a writer. It is how you see the world. It is how you live your day. It's how you collect your thoughts. And, yeah, you're frustrated. You've earned your frustration, but you're going to write your way out of this. And I said, dad, I love you. You're my best friend. You're totally wrong. And three weeks later, I called him and said, okay. I'm okay. What happened Three weeks later, I realized he was right. I had to write my way out of it. And that was the beginning of the actually learning how to like writing. Because writing is hard.

Yeah, it's super hard. What was the first big break for you?

I had the great good fortune of working right away out of college. So there were sort of several little mini breaks that encouraged me to continue in the career. First thing that happened was I was writing copy for Disney movies, so movies like Cocktail and the Fox and the Hound. There would be a double feature for you. And let's see if we can arrange that at the drive in post Covid.

So I was.

I was writing this and. And making good money because I could do a turn of phrase and make you want to Go see an animated fox chasing an animated dog. Yeah, it was a certain magic touch.

What a disappointing movie.

Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. I did. That's the thing, the chick about trailers is to convince people that there's something there when there's nothing there. So I got sort of that kind of advertising writing. My favorite story from that point in my career is that I won a key art award, which is the Oscars of advertising writing for movies, for the trailer for Adams Family. In fact, I shared that award with Mark Pecos, who is a friend and he was a legend in the copywriting business. And if you were ever to look at the award winning Addams Family trailer, you would realize that there is no copy in the trailer. It is scenes from the movie followed by a title, and it says, addams Family, rated pg.

What an award.

And so Mark and I won the award for best copy for that. And in my speech, I said I would like to thank Mark because without him, my bad copy would never been crossed out and his bad copy I never would have erased. So together we were able to come up with this wordless copy. And thank you for understanding the power of silence. So that perfectly synergizes what is wrong with Hollywood anyway. But I have that award and I love it and I'm never going to let it go.

All right, what's the best, most retold story from Sully or Elf?

Retold?

Yeah. Like, what's the story you tell all the time at parties told?

What's the story that no one ever told? Where I.

That's a good question.

I lost on the river in Texas. Hold him to Clint Eastwood at 3 in the morning. And he. He won $3 million off me, but in charity, gave me 2.8 million back. Stop that. That didn't happen. I wish it had happened. That would have been great. I'm all in. Clint. No, my. My favorite story, and this is a story that I tell a lot. But my favorite story is that I got to hear something that I don't think anybody else except for his family has ever heard, which is I got to hear Clint Eastwood laugh. And if you think about it, in all the movies that you've seen, even in his comedies, he doesn't laugh. He's a very serious cat in real life, he's incredibly genial, but his characters never laugh. And I had not yet met him. I was on the phone with him when I heard him laugh. And it happened from the following circumstance. He asked me what I thought about casting for the movie. Who would make a good sully. And we bandied about a few names. And then he said, what about that Tom Hanks?

You know, that Tom guy?

And I said, from Bosom Buddies. And that was the lustrous guffaw that Mr. Eastwood gifted me with that I'll always have in my ear chamber that got him. And I was so nervous when I was on that call with him. I couldn't believe I pulled a joke out of my hat. I was, I was completely. And everybody said to me, listen, he doesn't like the fanboy approach. We're all pros. You're a grown up. He loves your script. He's making your script. Just don't go on a thing where you're telling him how awesome he is. I made it through 90% of the call, and then Unforgiven came up and I folded like a pup tent. I did what must have been an hour and a half on Unforgiven and every shot and how it changed westerns forever and redeemed every bullet he'd ever fired on screen. And then I saw it with my dad and I just, I went on and on and on, and thank God he ended it graciously. And he said the following. Just another great Hollywood story. He said, that just goes to prove that I was right. And I said, well, what were you right about? He said, well, I keep a letter framed in my office. It's the only letter I've ever framed, and it's from my head of development that was working at Malpaso at the time that Unforgiven came in as a script. And the letter reads, essentially, dear Clint, not only is this readable bunch of garbage not worthy of your time and your talents, but no one should ever make this movie. It's irredeemable. I, I, I'm stained by having read it. It's awful.

Unforgivable.

Yeah, it is. It was unforgivable. And of course, this movie goes on to win every award and win Best Picture and nominated for best screenplay. And it's a legendary screenplay. And Clint said, I keep that, I keep that frame to my office to remind myself never to listen to anybody.

Nobody, in the words of William Goldman, nobody knows anything, and just go, go with your gut.

And his gut has been pretty golden, so it was nice to be on the, on the proper side of his gut.

That's amazing. CS Lewis once said, we don't need more Christian books. We need more Christians writing great books. It seems like you've applied that advice to your own work. As a screenwriter. Right. Working writing in the mainstream, why that path?

Like I said, I never wanted to do it, so you'd have to ask. God, I feel like it's been, and I use a dog metaphor, looking at my little puppy here, it's been very akin to way a mother dog will lift a puppy by the scruff of their neck or anywhere in nature where you see the, the grown up lift the child from here to there and say, no, you're not doing that, you're doing this. That's what my entire career has felt like. I was not aiming to be a screenwriter. I think if my books had sold, I probably would have been happy to buckle into a novelist career. But that didn't happen. And again and again, the way the bills got paid was this movie storytelling. And the best part about writing for the screen is that it's so technically demanding that it never loses interest. For me, every movie is a solve. Every movie is an intense puzzle. And how you do a brand new thing within this old structure with this rising action and end of first act, middle of the movie, end of second act, hero in trouble. The movie going experience is linked ineluctably to the way street screenplays are structured. Now, you won't feel that in a movie, but you will feel the satisfaction that when something gets called back in the last 10 minutes of the movie that was laid down by the screenwriter in the first 10 minutes of the movie, if it's a good movie, you'll understand, oh, that's why he always carried his tennis racket. Or that's. That's what that phone message meant. That kind of set them up and knock them down. And the carrying an audience on the roller coaster of a movie ride is the hardest part of writing a screenplay. And I love that part of it. I love the science of it. I love that it feels inscrutable for ages and then suddenly locks in. I remember when I sent in the draft that they shot of Sully, my producer, Alan Stewart, she called me and she said, you must have gone to the chiropractor because you just cracked this spine's back and that's it. The script got aligned. And that last, in that last draft, and it worked.

I love it. You've reached, I got to imagine you've reached this place in your career where you've got a lot of choice of the projects you're going to work on, what you're going to write. I'm curious if your faith informs that process, like which projects you decide to.

Take on what does my faith not inform?

Yeah, that's the right answer.

It's just.

But what does that look like practically?

I don't know. I don't know what it looks like the other way. It just looks like life. I mean, it's just. I wake up, I start in prayer. It's the only place I want to be. I just came from meeting a friend who I've been in touch with a little bit, but I haven't seen her in. I don't know, I probably haven't seen her in nine years. But there was no question that that was an appointment set by God. She had a very specific thing that she didn't know she needed to talk about, and she did. And we turned it over to the Lord and we pointed it in his direction so that she didn't have to carry it anymore. She was carrying something that she didn't need to be carrying. So that's happening all day, every day. Just got these appointments around town. My last name is Komarniki, which is Ukrainian. My grandfather, Joseph Komarniki, was from the village of Komarniki in southwest Ukraine. And these are fraught times, heartbreaking times for us. But I mention him because he was a street corner preacher in Philadelphia. And my. It was a short order cook at Boyd's Diner. And then on his off time, he was either feeding the homeless or preaching on the street corner. And my dad was mortified by this. He was really embarrassed to have his dad out there. And he would go to listen to my dad. Not to listen, but to make sure that the people that inevitably heckled Joe were taken out of the crowd. My dad was a very strong guy. He was a football player, and he would just quietly strong arm someone away from the crowd and just say, you know, move on. You know, you don't. You don't need to heckle that gentleman. So he was protecting his dad in that way. But that thing that embarrassed my dad. Years later, my dad, I called him the diner booth preacher because that's where he could always be found, with the Bible open and sharing the gospel with every waitress and every wandering soul. And then he had a son in me who realizes that that's pretty much the only thing I want to do. My favorite thing in the world is to talk about Jesus. So he lets me talk about him all the time, every day, everywhere. It's really nice. Very humbling.

It is amazing. And knowing that that's your passion in life, I think it makes it even more interesting that you're writing the mainstream and not writing, quote, unquote, Christian films as if films have a soul, which obviously they don't. That's interesting to me. Do you find that these more mainstream films have ways of communicating spiritual truth even though they're not using the name of Jesus? I mean, I think about Unforgiven, I think that's a pretty good example.

There's one story, it's why people like to see Superman in the Jesus Christ pose in a superhero movie. Yeah, there's one. There's one story. Everybody's just telling it in a different way. And some people are telling it in a terrible way. But you can get an understanding of light in a terrifying movie if it's done right, because it shows you what the dark looks like. You're like, well, I don't want that. I want something other. I'm gonna run in the other direction from that. And when you say mainstream, it's just I want to tell the stories that move me. I'm about to direct a movie that I wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he's a Christian. But I say again and again, this movie is not a faith based movie. If Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a NASCAR driver, nobody would say that it's a NASCAR based movie. They would say it's a movie about a guy who drives nascar. So this is a movie about a guy who did a lot of things. His motivation was his faith in Christ, but it could have been in many things. But the power and beauty of it is it happened to be in the living God and impacted millions and millions and millions of people, and still does through his writings and through his courage, through the singular way that he lived out his faith. And it challenges us to live out our faith in that same way. And that grace was always first and foremost and that he brought a set of eyes to a hellish problem and did something about it. I think right now we're so frozen in time, frozen by the 24 hour cycle of bad news. We don't know how to act heroically anymore. We just sort of feel defeated.

So how do we escape that trap?

Well, the Ukrainian people actually showed us how you do it. You stop and you fight. You don't roll over and you have to fight back. Like Bruce Cockburn's great lyric, you got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

Yeah.

And the darkness is often a paper bully. Often. Look at how exposed Putin is now for being undermanned and under supplied and underprepared. And everyone was so in awe of his Power to bring the world to its knees. And a month in, he's retreating. I think that's the case with a lot of strongmen. I always pray when I think about people like that, I pray that God will Nebuchadnezzar them, that he will send them to a season of eating grass where they see that they are. They are not God and that they get a second chance because no one's beyond redemption.

Yeah. Amen. It reminds me of that Lewis quote. He says, christianity is a fighting religion.

Right.

It thinks God has made the world that space and time, heat and cold and all the colors and tastes and all the animals and vegetables are things that God made up out of his head as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists and insists very loudly on our putting them right again. Right. Pulling up our sleeves and fighting back against evil, against death, against injustice. Right. How do you think film. How do you think film can do this? Can film do this?

I think if you. Anytime you tell the truth, it can do it. My favorite thing about Sully is that it was a reminder and Sully's own humility. It was a reminder that without the rescue workers and the people on those ferries and everybody at the hospitals and everybody working in sync and the passengers keeping a cool head, it wouldn't have been 155. Like, everybody collaborated to be both hero and saved. We all need each other. And that message came through in that movie, and I think it landed the truth part of the plane.

Yeah.

And with Elf, you know, that's not a Christian movie. But guess what happens in Elf? Light wins. Everyone's afraid of Buddy and how New York's gonna change him and turn him into someone he's not. But you can't do that because he's just pure light. And he winds up changing everybody else because light wins. And that's. That's the fact, in the end of all this nonsense, light wins.

I read. I don't know if this is true. I read that when Denzel read the script for Training Day, he was like, I don't want to do it. And then he came back to it, and he wrote some passage of scripture in the margin of the script. I don't know what it was. But basically he decided to do the movie because he wanted to show that darkness doesn't win, that eventually you'll be found out and be held accountable for your actions. I was like, I love that.

Right.

It's a story about. It's a very dark film, but it's really a story about how darkness doesn't win. And I think film can communicate those truths in a really subtle but really powerful way.

Very wise. And David Ayer is a phenomenal writer and wrote another favorite movie of mine, Fury. But Training Day is a great, great script for the reason that Denzel said, but also just how it's knit together. The screenwriter side of that script is really strong.

What are your daily spiritual habits? What does that look like for you? You mentioned starting the day in the word in prayer.

Yeah. Everybody struggles with wanting to read the scripture more than they do. Everybody, no matter how much you read. Or so Rick Warren, in one of his little daily devotionals that my wife sent to me, I don't know, maybe a year ago, had this very simple thing which was his word first, his word last. And that just made it really easy. So I've got the Bible in one year, which is Alpha, puts out the Bible in one year, Nikki Gumbel. And there's scripture. There's New Testament and Gospel and Old Testament. And so start the day in scripture and then get into bed at night and end the day with scripture. That's what I've been doing for the last bit of time, and it's been very fruitful. I, like everyone had long droughts and grieved. At one point, I was really asking in Bible study, please pray that I would have an insatiable desire to read the scripture. And then about six months later, I got hired to write a movie about King David at Warner Brothers. And about two weeks into it, I'm sitting and I'm writing, and I've got the Bible open and. And I'm reading psalm after psalm and all of these parts of the Old Testament. And I just burst out laughing. I was like, well, there you go. There's your answer to prayer. You were struggling to read it for 10 minutes. Now you're reading it eight hours a day.

So that's good. Todd, what do great screenwriters do that good screenwriters don't do? Like, what's the delta between good and great in your craft?

Well, I would say this. You know, I haven't been lucky enough to work with on the producing side. I haven't been lucky enough to work with the geniuses like Zalien and Gil, Tony Gilroy. And, you know, there's a handful of people that are just extraordinary that I delight in watching their movies and reading their scripts. But I work a lot with as we develop Stuff at guy walks into a bar, my company. I work a lot with writers, pro writers that are. That are terrific writers. But the thing that's missing is twofold. One is almost nobody can rewrite forward well to take notes and make the script better. They're given notes to make the script better, and they can only get it, you know, sort of incrementally far. That's one thing, because there's. There's a listening block. All writers. All writers think they're done before they're done. And fatigue and ego and lots of things keep people from pushing through and doing really hard stuff. The other thing I found is I've met almost nobody who can do the last five yards. That's the really doing the fine brushwork that makes a script set apart. I haven't met anybody that can do that work. So what I say to young writers is, you know, there are about 10,000 people in the Writers Guild, and even at Peak TV now, you know, they're probably 2,000 people writing in the world for. For all this content. And that's an open door because there's nobody that can do it. Well, it's such a rare skill. So if you can hone it and you can work on your craft, you have a spot at the table. We're waiting. We please, please, good writers, please show. But the main thing I would request from all writers that are coming into the business or working in the business is that you just stop thinking that you're. Ever done. My scripts have 35 drafts. Never done, never done. I've got two guys that work for me that beat me up all the time. And the house rule is the script doesn't go out until every scene is as good as the best scene. And writers just don't have that. The writers I have worked with don't have that level of discipline and never quit. They don't, you know, one or. One or two. One or two. But yeah, and even.

Even once the sh. The script ships. I've heard Aaron Sorkin, one of my favorite screenwriters, talk about this. As soon as he turns in the script, he immediately wants to take it back and rewrite it. Right? Like, because there's always this belief that better is possible, that it can be better than it was before.

See, that's. That's the opposite viewpoint. So he's. He's a perfectionist. But what. What I've run into is the opposite. Ah, it's good enough. How much better can it get? It's got five great scenes. Like, people don't people just don't want to put in the work.

Right, Right. It's hard. That's exactly right. Yeah. But this is a theme we hear going back to the. The listening block. This is a theme we hear from people across a bunch of different vocations that not just hearing feedback, but listening to it and letting that feedback change your work to make it better. Like, that is one of the keys to mastering any craft. So if there's a listener right now sitting there, back, okay, how do I do this better? How do I receive and implement feedback better? What tips do you have for them, Todd?

Don't take it personally. Just think of it as what. What's best for the patient, you know, what's best for the script? And also, this took me a long time to learn, but there's no such thing as a bad note. And what I mean by that is most. Most notes you get are not great. If you're lucky and have a strong producer, then you can get great notes. But not every. Every note is. Is a great note, but every note will point to something. So if you get a really terrible note that is proof that the person didn't read the script or they're, you know, just completely bonkers, you still need to look at where that area was noted, and you need to make sure that you can shore it up and that you can defend why it is what it is. Because if you're just dismissing the note but not looking at the sore tooth, then you're denying something that's going to come back and get you later. So it's humility and embracing work. It's hard. Nobody wants to hear it's not good enough. Nobody. It hurts to hear that. But once you absorb that personal blow, then you put that aside and you're like, how do I make this special? How do I take it to the next level? How do I get better at my craft? Because every time you do go back, you have a chance to make it better, and you become better just by the fact that you're willing to do the work. More splinters. You know, I always talk about building chairs. We need more splinters in our fingers. We need more cuts and gashes. We need more proof that we're putting in the work instead of just hoping and wishing. And that's the other thing. I talk about this a lot, but the movie business, through the press over the last 30 or 40 years, has made screenwriting sound like a scratcher ticket. And that someone can come out of nowhere with one screenplay and change their life and make a million dollars. And although that does happen, if you are not prepared for a career, if you haven't done other work and that's your one script, you're going to be rewritten, and then you're going to have to start from scratch anyway. So just building up inventory, getting good, doing the practice of writing, writing all the time and not just having ideas, but writing, writing, writing.

It's just good old purposeful practice.

It's all in the work. It's all.

It's all in the work and putting in the reps. It's the same with any vocation. That's really good. Todd, three questions. I love wrapping up every conversation with. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting most frequently to others?

Well, one screenwriting book, which is Making a Good Screenplay Great by Linda Seeger. That's fantastic. That's the one that's not up in the lofty trees of metaphor and nonsense. That's the one I really like. I was thinking about a novel. Remember we were talking about crying earlier in this thing? I read a book a number of years ago now, and I recommend it all the time. I give it away a lot. Amazing novel called Stone Arabia. And I was finishing it on an airplane, and the section where everything sort of came together hit me with such a frying pan. It reshaped my face. And I sobbed there for a good 10 minutes in my chair in the airplane. And about half an hour later, the guy next to me said, hey, can I ask you what book you were reading? And I said, yeah, Stone Arabia. And he takes out a pen and he writes it down, and he underlines it, and he goes, I just want to make sure that I never, ever read that book.

That's amazing.

He's like, I don't want that happening to me. What did that book do to you? It's like a magic trick. I said, well, the great writing is like a magic trick. Just suddenly, boom, it's there, the emotion. So Stone Arabia is amazing.

Yeah.

You know, the classics. The. Probably the book that I reference the most is Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke, because there's so much good stuff in there about marriage. And when you're married and you have kids and everybody you know is married, you talk about marriage a lot. And that's. That's got my. My favorite thing about marriage, I think, which is when two people come together in love, their highest duty is to be the guardian over their partner's solitude. The guardian over their solitude. Everyone comes into marriages, and they think that they're supposed to disappear into the marriage or they're supposed to do everything with their partner or find everything in their partner, and that's not healthy. And if you don't have solitude time to do your own thing or do your, you know, your time with God or whatever you're seeking, you lose yourself, and then, therefore, you bring less of yourself into the marriage. So when your spouse is the protector of your solitude, it makes you so much stronger.

That is a word. I think about solitude a lot. I wrote about it in a recent book called Redeeming youg Time. We're living in what Lewis called the kingdom of noise. And solitude is one of the rarest things in the world. And, yeah, I think a lot about how I can cultivate it, but I can't cultivate it without my bride. And likewise, I do think about how to guard her time of solitude. Her time, you know, whether it's an hour in the morning before the kids get up, making sure she's got her time by herself, man. But I've never thought about. That's part of my job.

I'm just.

Yeah, that's. That's a good word. It's a good word. All right, Todd, who do you want to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith shapes their work?

Jordan Rayner.

Great. Done. It's. Good answer.

I'll interview you.

Yeah, let's do that. Let's do a mic flip. Todd interviews Jordan.

All right, we'll make it. We'll make it a Todd cast. I want to leave this thought because this work in faith, and it's been. It's been sort of the. The thing, the topic for the last number of years, and people have asked me. I've spoken to different groups about it. My approach is to, as you just said, flip the mic around, is to completely reinvigorate the conversation by saying, how in the world do I learn to integrate my work in my faith? Yeah, that's it. Because you talk about identity, you talk about being rescued and saved. And if you know Jesus and that's your journey, then all he wants from you is to guide you, how to integrate your work, your sleep, play everything through him so that he can, as you said, redeeming your time, he can redeem the fullness of your life. There is this thing called work that he calls us to. X amount of hours are demanded of us. We have to pay the bills. We have to do all these things. There's a reason for that. The world has been built by hands that work and backs that work and legs that work so. And minds at work. So clearly he finds joy in work. But just because it's the thing we do the most doesn't mean it's the most important thing, because you could just say the same thing. We sleep more than we work, or we'd like to sleep more than we work. We sleep a lot, but people don't talk much about how do you integrate your faith into your sleep. No, you integrate your sleep, your play, your joy, your wonder, your study, your full human experience through the fact that once upon a time, it's actually true that once upon a time, God so loved the world that he gave his only son. And that's the one thing that ever happened. It was happening before the beginning of time. Christ was with God, and it's the hinge of history. And his resurrection has shaped every single thing before, during, and after. Let's try to figure out how to integrate everything else into that and then we'll have real freedom.

I think if you asked Jesus to talk about his spiritual life, I think he would have looked at us like we were crazy. He's like, you mean my life? Like, I don't understand. All life is spiritual. All of my work is spiritual. Everything is spiritual. It's one line. It's fully integrated. Todd, I want to commend you for the truly exceptional work you do in the world. Thank you for telling stories, even some dark ones, that point to redemption, that shine light. And thank you for serving as light in a dark world. Todd, where can our listeners learn more about you and your work?

It's funny, I was talking recently about maybe writing a book and the topic came up about, well, what is your platform? And I was like, well, what do you mean, my platform? High heeled sheets.

I wrote Sully. That's my platform.

But what it meant was social media platform. What is your social media platform? And I have aggressively avoided having one. God bless you. I think tweeting is especially for a mind that likes wordplay and likes to be funny and fast. Tweeting is an invitation to hell. I mean, literally, it's just a way to constantly sabotage your place in the world by trying to be clever. So I've avoided all that stuff. And so when you say, where can you learn more? I don't know. I mean, watch this space. The next thing that's happening is we're going to make this Bonhoeffer movie and we start shooting in the fall and it'll be out next year sometime. It's called God Spy. So hopefully, by the grace of God, I'll be able to deliver something that.

That.

That moves the human soul.

I love it. Todd, thanks for joining us.

Peace of Christ, brother.

I hope you guys enjoyed that episode with Todd. Hey, if you're enjoying the Call to Mastery, do me a favor. Go leave a review of the show wherever you review your podcasts. Thank you guys so much for tuning in this week.

I'll see you next time, Sam.