Instant creativity: the secret to producing great work, with Brian Koppelman and Ramit Sethi

For every movie that gets made, there are thousands of movies that don't. There are three thousands and thousands of writers in LA right now struggling to get their next screenplay out there into the world. We want to know what it takes to go into that creative process. Want to know what it takes to wake up every day when your script got rejected yesterday and come back and do it again and do it better? Today I am thrilled to have one of the greatest filmmakers, producers and writers from Hollywood, Brian Koppelman. He has worked on movies. Some of my favorite movies, Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen and the Illusionist, and many, many more.

Hey, I'm Brian Koppelman. I'm a filmmaker. Some of my films are Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, Solitary Man. I'm also a podcaster. My podcast, the Moment, is on itunes. And thrilled to be here with Ramit today.

Brian, welcome to the show.

Hey, man, I'm so happy to be here. This is fun.

You said know this. Whatever your favorite movie is, at some point during the writing of it, the screenwriter felt completely lost.

Oh, I'm so glad you brought that one up. Because I like to think about Francis Ford Coppola making the Godfather and knowing that there were days in the editing room of that movie, even when they felt like it was a total failure, when they had cut the wrong things out, left the wrong things in, and they sat there and watched it and thought, this is a disaster. And all of us feel hopeless in those moments. But it's so important to remind yourself that being creative involves massive failure all the time, because you're risking a lot, because we all have ego tied up in our imaginations. Ask anyone, do you have a good imagination? They're going to say yes. Nobody wants to think they're boring. They don't. Right? So when you put that stuff on the line and then when you come up short, it hurts, you know? And if you're honest with yourself, which is like the second part of all this, if you're rigorous, you know, because bundled in, you know, my message can sometimes sound idealistic because I do believe that you can locate your voice. And I do believe that the clearest way to get somewhere is by finding that true voice and communicating it. And I encourage people to try every day. But the rigor is the difference maker. The sort of rigorous attention to making what you do better. And so to create with as much passion in silencing your critical inner voice when you're first creating, and then to stop and apply rigor to judging it and to making it Better part of that is the feeling of, oh, this is terrible. And all of us feel. Last year, my partner David and I won an Emmy award as part of the team that made ESPN 30 for 30s. We had a 30 for 30 documentary called this is what they Want about the tennis player Jimmy Connors and the U.S. open in 1991. And I remember days and Rolling Stone magazine just did a list of all the 30 for 30s. And they said out of all of them, this is what they want was the fifth best one. And I can remember day after day coming home, editing that movie and telling my wife and my kids that the day was like wasted because we made it worse. You know, I watched, I was working, working all day, making changes, making changes. And then we would watch the thing at 7 o' clock before going home and just know it was better yesterday. And it was terrible. And, you know, you feel stupid and you feel like it's unsolvable. And so then you have to wake up the next day and just go attack it as hard as you can again. And you know, once you've done it a few times, yeah, you, some part.

Of you knows you're in the middle of the process.

This is what it feels like to try to do something great.

Yes, I feel 98% self loathing. I want to kill myself. But in the distant recesses of my mind, I know that it's probably going to be all right if I keep attacking it. Okay, let's go to the next vine that you did. This one was, if you only have an hour a day to write, look at that as a positive because it forces you to focus and work with intensity.

Yeah. So our first screenplay rounders, I had a full time job. My partner Dave, he was bartending at night. And so he would be done bartending. I'd be waking up to go to my job. My wife cleared out this storage area below the apartment in which we were living. And it was a terrible little room. It had a slop sink in it. It was room for basically like half a desk, one chair. One of us would sit on the floor. Usually I would sit on the floor, Dave would type, sometimes we'd switch. And we committed to two hours a day before going to work. And so it was two hours, not one hour, but in that two hours, first of all, one of the ways in which we knew we were doing the right thing and how you can know is I felt alive in those two hours in a way that was different than I felt at any other point during my day. Right Until I got back home to my wife and then my son. Now I have two kids, but then one. So that period of time I felt alive, engaged, like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Even though it was very hard, my head would hurt afterwards, right? I didn't quit my job because I had gotten one of your questions. I know later is a good piece of advice, but I had gotten a piece of advice that said, you know, don't quit your job because the pressure on you then to create will be so great, it'll be thwarting, right? You want to eliminate sources of anxiety when you're creating. So I built a whole routine for myself that I every day now that I. So that I put all that stuff at bay when I want to create. So in an hour a day, you just get rid of all the nonsense. You're going to come in there and you're going to do your thing. Because especially once you get a little momentum, just a little. And Hemingway talks about leaving yourself like a wet edge. So you do enough work, leave yourself a little roadmap for tomorrow. You'll be thinking about it at night before you go to bed. Your subconscious will be working on it. So when you walk in, boom. If you're sitting there and you have six, seven hours, you know, first of all, how much really concentrated work can you do in a day where you're like really at your top brain capacity? Unless you're some crazy programmer on tons of smart drugs, you know, not that many hours of true concentrated folks. So yeah, I think an hour a day, first of all, you go back to that page, you could write two pages, maybe three. I don't know. If you wrote three pages a day in an hour, it would be amazing. In a month you'd have a screenplay and you want a novel, a 300 page novel in three months.

It takes me back to the hellish process of writing my book. This book I wrote on personal finance. And just like you, two hours before work every day at a coffee shop and coming home, resting for about like 30 minutes, writing for another hour and then going to sleep for two years. But. But I love what you said about cutting away the bs. If I was sitting there on a Saturday, I mean, I'm like, oh, I.

Should do this, let me make some tea.

And then, oh, I don't know if.

This is going to be good.

Let me research all these books with one hour. You have to write. Otherwise you walk out of that room with nothing on the page.

You know, to you, that Piece of material is everything, Right. You spend all this time crafting, creating, and what you really want is somebody to read it. And it could be in any area of life. Right. It could be the plans, if you're an architect, that you've given to the client. Right. Or your bid, if you're in advertising, your presentation that you've spent 20 hours a day on for three months. What you really want, if you're honest with yourself, is. Is the person to read the script, stand up, say, I never have to read anything else again, and jump out the window and kill themselves. Because that's what you feel like your work should be, the result of this work. Right. That's never gonna happen. And because you know What? They're doing 25 things that day. Maybe that day, the head of the agency said, hey, guys, we can't tell anybody. We can't afford to take on new clients. So for the next month, you have to pass on everything. What if I read something great? It doesn't matter. If they're not earning money right now, it's a blanket pass. Great. Can I tell people no, because then they'll know that we can't spend money because I have to refinance. Well, we don't know that on the other end of it, Right. All we know is the no. Which feels like judgment from a God above. Yeah. And so right away, that taught me, like, a rejection only means something. It's a useful tool if it makes you look. When you can get to the place where you can look objectively at your work and measure it against the rejection. Okay, this person said X. Do I see X in this? If I do, is X a problem? If it is, can I remediate that problem? Is it fatal if the problem's fatal? Do I get that from three other people? Okay, there's this fatal problem. I either have to fix it or put this one aside and go on to the next one. But the fact of the rejection alone, meaningless. And I learned it early, and I've been able to hold fast to that. So that when the Illusionist was rejected by everybody, I never doubted for a second it was going to be a movie that could do 100 million worldwide, which is what it did.