a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There

0:00:06 Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ Podcast. I’m Sonal. Today we have a unique sort of
0:00:11 crossover episode with writer/director/producer Brian Koppelman, who, with his partner David
0:00:16 Levine, also wrote some of the most popular and still-discuss movies like Ocean’s 13
0:00:21 and Rounders, which we’ll also touch on in this episode. But currently, Brian is a co-showrunner
0:00:26 with David on Billions, which airs on Showtime and the newest season actually drops this weekend.
0:00:30 The reason I’m calling this a sort of crossover episode is that Brian also interviewed Mark
0:00:36 Andreessen for his podcast, The Moment, which you can listen to on iTunes and elsewhere
0:00:38 if you want to hear more of their thoughts on the difference between hallucination and
0:00:44 vision, putting your art or products and yourself out into the world, and more. We also put
0:00:49 the written Q&A version of that conversation up if you want to read it on A6NZ.com. But
0:00:52 there are two separate conversations, so you don’t have to have listened to either to
0:00:57 follow both. Today’s discussion begins with Mark interviewing Brian, and I jump in in
0:01:01 between here and there as well, starting with the business of creativity and the creativity
0:01:07 of business, then going into how to speak to power, speak to one’s team, speak to co-partners,
0:01:11 as well as managing the emotions and ego around all that. And finally, ending on some specific
0:01:16 moments about Billions The Show in the last 10 minutes, where I’ll signal a light spoiler
0:01:21 alert warning beforehand. We’re here to talk about the business and making of film and
0:01:27 TV, and startups, and tech, and the parallels, and whatnot. Take it from the top, Mark.
0:01:31 Fantastic. So, Brian, thank you for doing this. So, I’ve always been fascinated. I’m deeply
0:01:37 fascinated by the process of creative expression and success, for sure, in technology. And
0:01:40 we think of what we do up here as fundamentally trying to find the most creative entrepreneurs
0:01:44 and trying to help them build enormous, both creative and professional and business success
0:01:49 around what they do. And it strikes me for a long time that there are a lot of similarities
0:01:54 between how the valley works and tech works and how entertainment works, film, television,
0:01:56 other forms of entertainment works. There’s some big similarities. There’s also some
0:02:00 big differences, which hopefully we’ll talk about. You know, Gallagher’s obviously been
0:02:04 super successful across both film and television for a long time, and even before that in music.
0:02:08 But I’m going to focus on film and television. Let’s start with this. What was the first
0:02:12 project that you, and I think it was you and your partner, David, first project that you
0:02:17 view that you and David were responsible for creating, selling, and making?
0:02:22 It was Rounders, for which we wrote the screenplay. And today, there are people online arguing
0:02:28 about that movie, which is incredibly satisfying, because as you know, when you make these bets,
0:02:34 it takes a long time to know if you were right very often. And Rounders was rejected. It was
0:02:39 incredibly difficult. The movie wasn’t a big box office hit. But 21 years later, people
0:02:44 are in ferocious online arguments about the most microscopic moments in the film, which
0:02:48 I, back then, of course, I would have said two things. I would have said we were trying
0:02:52 to make a movie like, and write a movie that would have the effect on people that movies
0:02:56 like Diner had on us, which is that we would watch them over and over again and quote them.
0:03:01 And so the fact that that happened is really rewarding, and it was kind of in our minds.
0:03:06 But when we set out to do that, we knew that there was only a needle in a haystack chance
0:03:11 of success. The doing it, we knew right from the beginning, and I think this is something
0:03:15 that has been really important to our ability to continue to do this work, David and me
0:03:22 for this long is from the beginning, it was only about us getting in a room or going separately
0:03:29 in our individual rooms before we would come back together and doing the work itself, trusting
0:03:34 that if we found a way to do the work itself well enough, some rewards would come. Some
0:03:40 have been really delayed rewards and some have been much quicker. We never seem to
0:03:42 know which it’s going to be.
0:03:45 So let’s start with for people who haven’t seen rounders, maybe thumbnail description
0:03:51 of rounders. Rounders is a movie set in the poker underground of New York and Matt Damon
0:03:54 and Edward Norton, John Malkovich are the stars of the movie, and John Turturro. And
0:04:00 it’s about a character who’s faced with a life decision, which is, is he going to pursue
0:04:05 his passion, this thing that he believes he’s great at, even though he’s had setbacks. And
0:04:09 in fact, these setbacks have threatened his stable life. And so he’s at a point where he
0:04:15 has to choose the stable, traditional road or the road that his heart is telling him
0:04:19 to pursue. And that’s the central question. And the movie has a lot of sort of heightened
0:04:24 dramatic, you know, you want to choose a heightened dramatic construct in which to hide the theme.
0:04:26 Because the last thing you want to do, if you want to talk about the themes, you know,
0:04:32 be, as you had Kowski and just write essays, if you were going to tell it in a fictional
0:04:36 construct, make that construct compelling. So only later people wonder and feel what
0:04:37 the themes are.
0:04:42 So when you say the, do the work, like what was, what was the do the work part of rounders
0:04:43 for you and David?
0:04:50 First, it was about researching. So I walked into a poker club one night, heard the way
0:04:55 the people spoke, saw what it looked like, and immediately recognized, nobody’s made
0:05:01 a movie about this. I can’t believe this exists. This should be a movie. I called Dave. He
0:05:04 said, that’s great. Who are the people in the world that we’re going to write about?
0:05:07 Who are the characters? Who are we going to care about?
0:05:13 So we started going to this poker club most every night, taking notes surreptitiously.
0:05:17 And then at a certain point when we felt we had enough of those notes, we started really
0:05:22 figuring out what the character’s question would be, who the character would be, what
0:05:27 the important relationships would be in his life. And then we had to, so then we started
0:05:31 outlining it, and then we had to just decide, okay, starting tomorrow, we’re going to meet
0:05:35 every morning. One mistake I see people make when they decide they have to do some kind
0:05:39 of artistic work is they think it means they have to grab that identity so hard that it’s
0:05:45 to shut out the rest of their identity. But what I found was you don’t have to do that.
0:05:48 I didn’t want to put all the pressure on myself of quitting my job and saying, I need a beret
0:05:49 and an easel, and I’m an artist.
0:05:51 So what was your job at the time?
0:05:55 I was working as an executive in the music business. David was bartending. And so what
0:05:58 we did was when he would come off bartending, he would sleep a couple hours, and I would
0:06:03 get up extra early, and we would meet in a storage locker underneath my apartment that
0:06:07 had a slop sink in it because it was an institutional little room, had barely room for both of us
0:06:13 to sit. I sat on the floor a lot of the time. And we met every day for two hours in the
0:06:14 morning to write the script.
0:06:16 And this was purely on spec?
0:06:21 Completely on spec. In fact, this is I think a piece of this puzzle that I never told before,
0:06:28 which is that when we had the idea, David met a young producer and told them the idea
0:06:33 and the producer offered us $5,000 and said, for five grand, I’ll be your partner. I’ll
0:06:36 give you five grand, but then we’re going to share and if we sell it, we’re going to
0:06:40 share in the writer’s fee and I’m going to be your partner on the thing. And we were
0:06:45 tempted because it represented, hey, wait, someone’s paying me to write. We’re professionals
0:06:49 then, right? But we asked some advice of a woman named Rachel Horowitz who was at Fine
0:06:53 Line. She happens to be the sister of Adam Horowitz, the Beastie Boys.
0:06:54 That’s awesome.
0:06:57 Rachel was a great executive and I knew somebody who knew her and we met and met with her and
0:07:01 we said, what should we do? Someone’s willing to pay us $5,000 and she said, I don’t need
0:07:05 to hear the idea, but if someone’s willing to pay you guys who have no credits, $5,000
0:07:09 now, write the thing and you’ll have a much better chance of success. And we’ve taken
0:07:15 that lesson to heart still to this day to write unencumbered. We like to go in a room
0:07:25 and let our idea come to fruition fully. Let ourselves, let us work out all of the complicated
0:07:28 parts of it without outside interference.
0:07:31 So let me ask you a lot of professional, one of the adages I think professional writers
0:07:34 is never write for free. If you write for free, you’re a sucker.
0:07:36 Well, that was like Samuel Johnson said that, right?
0:07:38 Okay. Yeah. You’re a sucker. You’re being taken advantage of, right? Never, never, you
0:07:41 know, a doctor wouldn’t, doctor wouldn’t do surgery for free. A pilot wouldn’t fly
0:07:44 a plane for free. Writers shouldn’t write for free. But, and I know you’re not writing
0:07:48 for free per se, but like, there is an element to this of like how, like, it feels like a
0:07:51 lot of your peers need the deal before they’ll write.
0:07:56 Well, it depends where you, where you put EV, right? Okay. Expect, you know, right, right?
0:08:03 Where do you put the EV? By the way, I look at the way I view the need for personal expression.
0:08:06 I don’t, I actually completely disagree with that quote. I don’t understand what the quote
0:08:09 is talking about. Don’t be taken advantage of. And it’s also kind of making fun of the
0:08:11 artistic impulse. It’s saying, are you a professional or not?
0:08:16 Yeah. But I would assert you can be a professional. You can treat, you can act like a professional
0:08:20 before you’re paid as a professional. It depends how you’re going to approach it. It depends
0:08:24 what your expectations are. But our expected value, even though it might have been foolhardy
0:08:29 to think so, was that there would be something on the other side of it. And I’ll say this,
0:08:34 the expected value of not doing the work is zero. Like, there’s no, there’s no question
0:08:37 about the EV of just thinking I’d like to write and not write it.
0:08:41 Well, if you had shown up in, if you, if you guys had just gone and tried to pitch, try
0:08:45 to get an agent at stage of your careers, would you have been able to do the project?
0:08:49 No, probably not other than we got someone who would have paid us five grand, but, but,
0:08:53 but then later we did make the mistake of pitching at various times. And I mean, occasionally
0:08:59 a pitch becomes, has become a movie for us. But for whatever reason, we’ve found that
0:09:04 our strongest work is done in private. And then we take it out and show the world. And
0:09:10 that’s the, for us, the, for us, we find that when you, when you pitch an idea, as you know,
0:09:16 when someone comes to pitch you, you’re entering into dialogue about this endeavor. And inevitably
0:09:19 what we found is a smart person would say something in the room, cause let’s assume
0:09:24 for a moment that the people across the desk are an idiots. Someone says something smart.
0:09:27 You can’t help but have them in your head when you’re then going to do the work. And
0:09:30 that might be a smart thing, but it really might not be the right thing. Because maybe
0:09:36 I’ve only explained this, this feeling that, that, that I have about what this thing could
0:09:42 be. Maybe I’ve explained it in a way the best I could at that moment, but left to my own,
0:09:45 it would take all sorts of different terms. But, but I have that, that phrase that the
0:09:50 person uttered to me. And I have to keep returning to that for some reason, because I’ve already
0:09:52 let them inside this process.
0:09:56 I have a question about this though, because, you know, when we go back to this idea of
0:10:00 you had the confidence to do this in private and then put it out into the world. And even
0:10:04 with the rounders, there was sort of a long staying power that came about with that. It
0:10:06 wasn’t like an instant box office hit in one.
0:10:07 That’s right.
0:10:12 How do you, what’s a timeframe that you sort of a gauge the success and B how do you sort
0:10:18 of balance this sort of impetus from executives and other people in your life who care, who
0:10:24 are producing and paying for these products with sort of keeping the creative process intact
0:10:26 without over rotating on the data.
0:10:31 So let me back up to answer that question. I have to tell you where I was before we wrote
0:10:37 the first thing. And where I was was in a pretty decent state of misery. Because although
0:10:43 I had a job that was well-paying and on the surface scene creative, and although I had,
0:10:49 I was lucky enough, even having Amy, and then our first child did not, was not a salve for
0:10:53 the way I was feeling, which was like, I wasn’t doing this thing that I knew I had to pursue.
0:10:59 I wasn’t doing the work. I was blocked. And I have this notion that when you’re a blocked
0:11:05 person, when you allow this creative impulse to be kept down, it dies. And like any other
0:11:10 kind of death, there’s toxicity that’s attached to that. And as in the toxicity I knew would
0:11:16 leech out and would actually make, you know, leech onto the people that I loved because
0:11:20 I would become a bitter person. And I wanted to be the kind of person who would come home
0:11:25 and tell my kids that they should chase their dreams with rigor. You know, people often
0:11:30 just think of it as a relic of the 60s. And it’s like, Hey, pursue your dreams, do your
0:11:34 thing. But it’s like, well, wait, if you have a dream, if you have a dream, work with incredible
0:11:38 rigor and discipline to pursue it. And so I finally got to the place where I knew, and
0:11:42 it wasn’t about, can I have a movie in the movie theaters? What it was about was, can
0:11:46 I find a way to have the courage to do the work that I’m worried I’ll fail at the work
0:11:50 that I think is going to be meaningful. And so I decided to follow my curiosity and my
0:11:56 obsessions. And it’s not merely pay following your passion. What it is, is figuring out
0:12:00 if I’m obsessed, I’m incredibly curious if I can get to the root of that. And I can
0:12:05 somehow create something out of it that is worthy. First of all, in the doing, I will
0:12:11 change and become better. To answer your question about success, the moment that I was in there
0:12:17 for two hours a day, I was charged the rest of the day. So the job that it seemed mundane
0:12:21 and bitter and sort of annoying to me was much easier to get through because I’d spent
0:12:27 two hours already firing on all cylinders. And so that in the beginning, and of course
0:12:31 along a career, you can hold onto those things and you can let them go because we’re all
0:12:38 human, which means that we’re all pray to, we can all fall, fall prey to being judged
0:12:42 by a standard that isn’t our own. And we have to find a way to remind ourselves that
0:12:46 our own standard is the standard that matters. So of course, I’m not going to say that the
0:12:49 whole time I’ve been doing this, I only cared about what I felt like when I was doing the
0:12:53 work. I will say that each time I have reframed and refocused to remember that what matters
0:12:57 is what I feel like when I’m doing the work. It immediately makes me feel better. And then
0:13:01 I immediately don’t care about the rest of that stuff. Easier to say, of course, you
0:13:05 might think easier to say because we’ve had this success, but I know I can point to a
0:13:09 movie like “Solitary Man,” which was a commercial failure. I mean, it made its money back, but
0:13:13 it was not a big commercial success. But I know it’s the best movie we ever made. It
0:13:18 got these incredible reviews. So I wasn’t crazy. That’s how I know this question. I’m
0:13:22 really interested in this delusion versus genius or delusion versus capability. But
0:13:25 I wouldn’t change anything of the four-year struggle to write that movie, and then we
0:13:30 directed the movie because as an artist, if you get to express the thing you want to
0:13:37 express, and then you get to make it, you’ve kind of won. The odds against are so great.
0:13:41 Even the odds against completing something, right? Even the odds against actually showing
0:13:44 up, “I want to be a writer is way different than I am a writer. I want to be an artist
0:13:48 is way different than I am an artist.” And we decide when you get to give yourself those
0:13:55 designations. But I was so sad, so miserable, that it immediately changed upon doing the
0:13:59 work. And so I have had to force myself to have that be the standard.
0:14:03 To go back to the state. So do you ever suffer from writer’s block?
0:14:04 No, because I have rituals.
0:14:05 Like morning pages?
0:14:06 Can you describe that?
0:14:11 Yeah, I meditate every morning, and I do morning pages every morning. So morning pages, like
0:14:16 out of Julie Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way,” I do three longhand pages, a real brain
0:14:23 dump, where I just let the pen move for three pages no matter what. And it has this incredible
0:14:27 effect on me. It’s self-hypnosis. It’s a brain dump so that you’re putting all the
0:14:32 dross just gets out there on the page. Also, it has the effect of, “I can’t be blocked.
0:14:37 I’ve already written three pages.” So you’re in a state of flow. You’re in a state of movement.
0:14:42 That is the tool I used to become unblocked when I was 30. And when I was that unhappy
0:14:46 and I said I had to try to write something, I had given Dave, “Awake and the Giant,”
0:14:50 within, and Dave gave me “The Artist’s Way.” And the combination of those things made me
0:14:56 realize I had to figure out what it was that I really wanted to do and be. And then “The
0:15:00 Artist’s Way” gave me this tool to try to actualize it. And as soon as I started doing
0:15:03 those pages, I was like, “Oh, I can do this. I can write. I can actually make good on it.”
0:15:05 And I’ve done it for 23 years.
0:15:06 Do you keep the pages?
0:15:10 No, you burn. My kids have instructions to burn upon my day.
0:15:11 Upon your day.
0:15:14 So I was going to say, you know, decades or centuries later, these get published as
0:15:15 the notebooks.
0:15:19 Yeah, they can’t. I’ve read Camus’ notebooks and Somerset Mom’s notebooks. And I’m happy
0:15:22 that they exist, but that probably wasn’t their intention.
0:15:25 So when you guys sold “Rounders” or got the gun, whatever you want to say, the trigger
0:15:30 got pulled. So what did you guys have when you walked into the room to do that at that
0:15:31 point?
0:15:35 Well, so we finished the screenplay. It was first rejected. It was my favorite story.
0:15:40 But I tell in detail on my blog, which is not a very active blog, at BrianCobbleman.com.
0:15:45 But we were rejected by every single agency in Hollywood. One said it was overwritten,
0:15:48 another said it was underwritten. I still don’t know what either of those terms mean.
0:15:52 And I wrote down everything they all said. And this was an incredible Hollywood lesson
0:15:56 because, you know, in the beginning, every rejection feels so personal. Every rejection
0:15:59 also feels so final, right, in the beginning.
0:16:05 I wrote down what everyone said and then we sold the thing. And that Monday, so we sold
0:16:13 the thing over a weekend on a Monday and by Tuesday, every single agency that had passed
0:16:18 called us to try to sign us. And I read them all their comments. I had it on a yellow legal
0:16:22 pad and I just read them. I said, “Well, but you said that the thing was overwritten.”
0:16:23 I did. I read it to them all.
0:16:25 And it wasn’t that the movie had gotten made and they liked it. It wasn’t that the movie
0:16:27 was a commercial success. It was simply that you sold it.
0:16:32 The thing had intrinsically changed in the work itself. And they all, nobody owned it.
0:16:36 Not one of them said, “You know what? I guess I’m…” They all said, “I didn’t read it.
0:16:40 It was my reader. It was my assistant. I meant to read it. I read the wrong script that was
0:16:45 about poker and I thought it was your script.” It was incredible. But it immediately framed
0:16:49 the question for me, for the rest of my career about who knows what.
0:16:55 So then it’s bought by Miramax, which is something I guess they used to say with pride. And David
0:16:58 and I were just the writers. We weren’t the producers on the movie. We weren’t the directors
0:17:03 of the movie. And this has to do with continuing to work with Rigger. There was a moment where
0:17:07 they were going to hire a director who we thought would fire us off the movie and we
0:17:12 thought would do a bad job. We met him. We didn’t like him. And so even though it wasn’t
0:17:19 in our billet, we decided we’d better find a director who they would hire but who would
0:17:24 be someone we felt we could work with. And it was really overstepping our position.
0:17:32 And I think part of it is, and this gets into us, part of it was that each of us were raised
0:17:37 in environments where we saw people take these kinds of risks. And my dad was an entrepreneur
0:17:42 and I saw a lot of the time the way that he would just overstep his position to achieve
0:17:49 a result. And so we found out through some sources who directors were that the movie company,
0:17:52 who they were interested in making movies with, we triangulated that with people we
0:17:57 could get to. And we found out that our agency represented John Dahl, who was really high
0:18:02 on our list. And we said to our agents at the time, “Listen, we’re going to stay in
0:18:06 California until you can get us a meeting with John Dahl.” And they were like, “Well,
0:18:09 how are we going to do that?” We said, “Well, send him this script, the letter that we
0:18:13 write, and we’ll just wait around.” And they had all just competed to sign us, right?
0:18:20 So this was the very beginning of this relationship with the agent. And in a way, he had to prove
0:18:24 himself to us. We were able to leverage the newness of the situation, even though often
0:18:29 people in that situation think that they work for the agents. The agents do a really good
0:18:34 job of making people feel lucky to have them. But we were aware of the actual leverage in
0:18:39 the situation. He got the script to John. John read it. Luckily for us, he really liked
0:18:42 it. He came over and met us at our hotel. We all shook hands on it. We knew he was an
0:18:48 honorable person. We then got to have this incredibly, incredible moment, which now when
0:18:52 I think back in it, I can’t even believe happened, which is we then called the producers and
0:18:55 the studio and we said, “John Dahl’s going to direct ‘Rounders’.” And they all went,
0:18:58 “Well, that makes no sense. He’s supposed to direct this other movie for us. How could
0:19:00 you do that? You overstepped.” And we all said, “Well, do you want John Dahl to direct
0:19:04 the movie?” And they all went, “Yeah.” And what was really great about that is then
0:19:08 that allowed us to be on set every day. Because when you’re the one who brought the director
0:19:14 in and you have this relationship, plus John has no ego and he knew we understood the world
0:19:20 of poker. Also, this incredibly lucky thing was we were the same age as Matt and Edward.
0:19:24 And so there was a relationship that developed right away, which was we were going to take
0:19:28 these guys and show them the world of underground poker. We were going to be experts about this.
0:19:31 John Dahl gave us our limits. He was like, “You have to really think carefully about
0:19:35 your set of actors. You can’t contradict me. We’re going to work together, but there’s
0:19:39 a chain of command.” And with that, he gave us complete freedom. Within that, he was like,
0:19:43 “Now, help me make the movie.” But none of it would have happened if we would have
0:19:47 pitched a movie. We would have been powerless. We had ownership because we’d written the
0:19:49 whole thing and we’d proven we were experts.
0:19:51 Can I ask you a quick question on this notion of ownership?
0:19:52 Yeah.
0:19:56 David Levine and you guys are both the showrunners for Billions. I’m dying to know how, because
0:20:05 when a studio buys your show, someone is producing billions, it is your show as showrunner.
0:20:08 What if there’s a conflict and you guys have a huge falling out and I’m thinking of the
0:20:13 case of the Sherman Paladinos and Gilmore Girls and they had to exit before the last
0:20:17 season and it totally changed the last season of the show and then they came back to remake
0:20:21 the thing? Is there this thing where you’re owning this thing that other people are now
0:20:24 sharing in and then you have to give up your baby? How does the ownership thing work?
0:20:32 I’ll tell you, it’s so analogous to the way a founder and will work with the investors,
0:20:38 the VC, the board. It’s up to you to manage that relationship. It’s up to you to set
0:20:47 the terms. This does get into questions of privilege. As two white men growing up with
0:20:53 David’s grandfather and my father were pretty successful, we learned at a young age how
0:20:57 to talk to powerful people. Most people don’t get in education and talk to powerful people.
0:20:58 You’re so right about that.
0:21:02 When people ask about advantages, yes, getting college paid for was a huge advantage, meaning
0:21:07 that I knew I could take certain risks that other people couldn’t because I didn’t have
0:21:12 a massive debt. But much more important or certainly equally important was from a young
0:21:16 age, my dad would like put me in situations where I would have to deal with powerful people
0:21:21 and I would have to find a way to get the result I wanted. He would let me be in a recording
0:21:26 studio when he was making records and sometimes ask my opinion in a room full of incredibly
0:21:30 scary powerful people. He would let me be in meetings and he would leave and I would
0:21:31 conduct stuff.
0:21:32 You really set you up for that.
0:21:39 From a young age, how to interact? How do you talk to power actually? Give us the advice
0:21:40 for our listeners.
0:21:44 The main thing is don’t treat them as the most of the time. Don’t treat them with a
0:21:49 sense of awe and that their station makes them better than you. But also don’t try to condescend
0:21:53 to them as though you’re the smartest person in the world. And you know the biggest thing?
0:21:55 Make them laugh once in a while.
0:21:56 That’s actually great.
0:21:59 I mean, right? Walk into a room, make them laugh, make them feel like you have the answers
0:22:03 to their problems and that you’re comfortable in your own skin. I mean so much of what I’m
0:22:09 talking about is an ingrained sense of comfort in your own skin is being able to just continue
0:22:13 to grow. You must always continue to grow, continue to better yourself, but find a way
0:22:19 to sit there in the room relaxed and understand that you’re not sitting there with the all-knowing,
0:22:25 all-powerful Oracle or Oz, which is to say to answer your question. It’s our job to make
0:22:32 the show, to make the actors comfortable, to make the crew feel empowered, to make
0:22:36 sure the show is written, edited and shot, right? It’s also our job to make the show
0:22:42 on budget, to communicate with the show time if there’s going to be, “Hey, guess what?
0:22:44 This next week it’s going to look like we’re over, but here’s how we’re going to solve
0:22:49 that the week after.” Also to make them feel heard when they’re talking about the show.
0:22:50 You’re so right.
0:22:54 If they’re giving notes, make them feel heard, make them know that you actually are listening.
0:22:57 Again, it’s really important that we only take the notes that’ll make the show better
0:23:01 and that we do that in a way that makes them feel good about the process.
0:23:04 That’s fantastic advice. That’s so great. I feel like that can apply to any business.
0:23:05 It does. I think that applies across the board.
0:23:07 You know how I coach people how to do that?
0:23:08 How do you?
0:23:09 Yeah.
0:23:10 From Larry Sanders.
0:23:11 From Artie.
0:23:12 So tell us.
0:23:13 I don’t know where you’re from.
0:23:16 We both love Larry Sanders, like my third favorite show of all time.
0:23:22 So people haven’t seen it. You must watch it immediately. So Artie, the producer, played
0:23:26 by the legendary Riptorn, Artie, the producer.
0:23:30 So typically we see this with young people out in here, which is like, you give somebody,
0:23:33 in your world, it’s called a note. In our world, it’s like feedback or here’s an idea.
0:23:37 You give somebody an idea and they immediately get their backup. Well, they do one of two
0:23:40 things. They either take it way too seriously and they try to do everything you tell them
0:23:44 or they get their backup and they get offended, “How dare you question my vision?” kind of
0:23:47 stuff and then that sets up a weird dynamic where you feel like you can’t talk to them.
0:23:52 Both of those are bad. One way you basically hijack their creative vision, usually a bad
0:23:55 effect. The other way is you end up with a bad, a hostile relationship.
0:23:59 And so, Artie’s whole approach to dealing with the network executives in Larry Sanders
0:24:03 is a show inside a show, basically. It’s a show about a show. His way of dealing with
0:24:07 the suits from the network was basically that they’d say, “Well, I don’t know. I think
0:24:10 the curtain that the talk show has read, we really think it should be purple.” And Artie
0:24:13 would literally say, “That is a really interesting idea. I am really going to think hard about
0:24:17 that one.” And he would read it on his legal panel. He goes, “Okay, okay. What else do
0:24:21 you have?” And then, of course, the show, the suit leaves the room, he rips up the
0:24:22 baby. And the suits are on their way out, and they’re like, “That was the best meeting
0:24:23 ever.” Yeah.
0:24:25 Is this a feeling of feeling that you’ve been hurt?
0:24:30 And so, that’s like, what I’m telling people is like, “That’s the baseline.” If you can
0:24:34 just do that, you’re better than most. And then to your point, if on top of that, you
0:24:36 can actually consider and actually absorb some of the feedback.
0:24:40 And sometimes, listen, nobody’s perfect. So, there are times I’m working 17 hours a day,
0:24:45 and somebody gives me a note I really disagree with, and I might say, you know, as you might,
0:24:50 I might, once in a while, say, “Listen, I tend to say kind of like, ‘Fuck off. That’s
0:24:51 a stupid idea ever heard.'”
0:24:54 I sometimes say that’s a stupid idea, but here’s the thing. If you have the right kind
0:24:58 of relationship with the people with whom you work, you can say that, because they know
0:25:03 that’s not your default position, and they understand, because you’re in dialogue with
0:25:07 them, but not operating from a place, no one’s operating from a place of fear, hurt, or misunderstanding.
0:25:11 And by the way, if you say that’s the stupidest fucking note I ever heard, call them the next
0:25:14 day and say, “Let me tell you what was going on yesterday. Here’s the way I’m going to
0:25:19 think about addressing it, or read this and tell me if you still think so.” It’s a constant,
0:25:24 you constantly have to remember, if you’re in our position, that you’re grateful to be
0:25:29 in this situation, but that you’re not an indentured, you’re not so grateful that you’re
0:25:32 going to prostrate yourself and ruin the thing in the process.
0:25:33 Of course.
0:25:34 And if you remember that, you’re in okay shape.
0:25:37 The part that I always struggle with here, and I wonder if a lot of people struggle with
0:25:41 this, is that I always had this belief that competency is a thing that will always get
0:25:45 you ahead. The result will speak for itself. How do you sort of play back the results to
0:25:50 tell the story that you want? Because oftentimes, the rounder’s example, this is the conversation
0:25:54 that’s happening around the movie, because people have ways of defining those things.
0:25:58 I think that’s a really big challenge. How do you sort of define it so that you can make
0:26:04 sure that the narrative you untold your way is that part of the point? I mean, in terms
0:26:05 of how people perceive your way?
0:26:11 Well, when you’re a showrunner of a going concern, you’re going to get to prove it out
0:26:16 or not prove it out, because you’re making the show. And I will say, certainly in the
0:26:22 relationship we have with Showtime, all their notes are suggestions. And so, Dave and I
0:26:25 are getting to prove it out every episode. I will say we did, so okay, there are a few
0:26:30 other things. It’s not bad thing to learn the mistakes people have made ahead of you.
0:26:35 It’s not bad to do research and know, well, what is the third round in this situation,
0:26:39 right? So if the third round in the situation is don’t go more than 3% over budget on a
0:26:46 given episode without having conversations, that that is the third round, then don’t be
0:26:50 a jerk. You’re in an incredibly lucky situation to find a way to do what you have to do. But
0:26:57 there are many other non-budgetary examples. So here’s how a pilot works. When I lay this
0:27:02 example out, there will be parallels to your world. So a pilot gets green lit. They give
0:27:08 you this amount of money to go make the pilot. And they’ve already approved the script.
0:27:13 You cast the show together. So that’s another one of these things where you’re trying to
0:27:18 find a way to express your opinions. Make sure you have the cast you want. While understanding
0:27:21 we’re in the real world, you’re not going to cast a complete unknown to play the lead
0:27:25 unless you have a bunch of other ways to say, well, that’s okay because in these three spots
0:27:32 we have people who aren’t. But then once that stuff’s done, guys go off, make your show,
0:27:36 right? Because once it starts going and before it’s edited, there is no feedback they can
0:27:41 really give you. You’re making the show. You’re making the show. You go in the editing room
0:27:46 after you have all this material. You know the show is going to fit in an hour long slot.
0:27:52 But most people, when they cut their pilot because they don’t actually have the real
0:27:59 limitation of an hour, will turn in a 67 minute pilot because they’re, every idea they had,
0:28:03 everything they want to be there. Now, David and I, because by the time billions have come
0:28:07 around, we’ve been doing this for a long time. And what happens when you give the 67 minute
0:28:13 thing is you’re inviting a bunch of people to tell you how to get the thing to 57 or
0:28:19 58 minutes. And suddenly they’re giving you their opinion on it. Also, by you not having
0:28:26 to have rigorously with discipline make those decisions, you’ve inevitably left in a bunch
0:28:32 of stuff that you shouldn’t have. So David and I decided and no matter what, we’re turning
0:28:37 something in that’s 57 or 58 minutes, maybe 56 if we could do it. We’re going to take
0:28:43 all of those questions off the table before showing it to the people who put up the money.
0:28:49 And I’ll tell you, we gave them this cut and we’re realistic people. So we knew all the
0:28:52 flaws and the things we would want to reshoot before it would go in the air. But you know,
0:28:55 they’re going to make it as some of the audience doesn’t know. When you shoot a pilot, there’s
0:28:58 no guarantee you’re going to have a series. They’ve invested a bunch of money, showtimes
0:29:01 known for if they make a drama pilot. It’s very likely they’re going to put it on the
0:29:07 air, but you don’t know. And so we turn over this pilot. And the first thing they said
0:29:12 to us when they called us was, you guys have already done all the stuff that normally takes
0:29:16 a month for us to work through with showrunners, which is you’ve gotten the thing into show
0:29:24 shape. And so that’s because we looked ahead at how best practice practices. And by the
0:29:28 way, it’s hard, right? It’s actually when you’re in the, then you’re in the situation.
0:29:32 You understand why everybody turns in at 67 minutes because you don’t have to, it’s much
0:29:38 easier to not have to make those decisions. Right? It’s much easier to hand the confidence
0:29:42 actually quite frankly, it’s easier to offload those decisions to the X, to someone else,
0:29:44 the people who are paying for it. Instead we said, you know, we’re going to make these
0:29:49 choices and we’re going to show them that this is the vision we have for the show. And
0:29:53 our structure, I think I’ve put the pilot script online at my, I think I put it online
0:29:57 at the blog. And if you go look at it, I put rounders up there too, which people have really
0:30:01 been reading a lot lately. But if you look at it structurally, it’s quite different than
0:30:05 the pilot that got on the air. Different scene starts it. And because when we got in the
0:30:10 editing room, we decided, well, now we have the opportunity to make the show be the best
0:30:15 version of itself. We were able to gain objectivity, even though it was all of our hearts in there.
0:30:17 It’s only in the edit that you get that arc totally.
0:30:19 And then there’s one message you’re delivering is like, here’s an incredible product. The
0:30:22 meta message I think you’re delivering is you guys are professionals.
0:30:26 And they said that to us. They specifically explicitly said, we know your showrunners who
0:30:31 can make the show. That was what gave. So this goes to your question of the relationship.
0:30:36 How do you establish a relationship with them that makes them your professional? We can
0:30:43 trust. And by the way, as you know, all you want is a founder show, a founder CEO who can
0:30:47 not make it your job to run the company and just take the best of your ideas. And you
0:30:50 want them to discard the worst of your ideas. Go knock it out of the park. Right. Go do
0:30:55 your thing. By the way, that’s hard. Those are hard one lessons over a career. Yeah. You
0:30:59 know what I mean? Those aren’t. We were 20 years in by the time. I think we sold rounders
0:31:06 in 1997 and we made the pilot of this in 2015. So that’s a long period of time over which
0:31:10 we figured this stuff out. So for people who aren’t aware, there’s a very interesting kind
0:31:14 of split and how movies are made and how TV shows are made at least these days, which
0:31:18 is movies are made. Generally, the writer writes the script, turns it over and then
0:31:21 other people run with it and other people being the presumably the producers and then
0:31:24 particularly the director, the director, the director ends up actually running the project
0:31:28 in a lot of ways, right? Maybe with a line producer or something. For TV shows, especially,
0:31:32 it seems like in the last couple of decades, you have this concept of showrunner and the
0:31:38 writers are often or usually at this point, the showrunners. And I’m just, I’m picturing
0:31:42 I don’t know, Louis B. Mayer or, you know, Jack Warner or somebody, you know, being
0:31:46 told that the writers should run the project and probably screaming and being very upset
0:31:49 like that would be impossible. And so two-part question, what was the left turn in the industry
0:31:53 that caused the writers to get in a position where they could be the showrunners? And then,
0:31:57 and then what did you guys do as writers to make sure that you specifically were able
0:31:58 to do that?
0:32:04 So there’s this, there’s this great book called Difficult Men by Brett Martin that’s about
0:32:12 five showrunners, David Simon, David Chase, Vince Gilligan, Sean Ryan and one other that
0:32:13 I’m not remembering right now.
0:32:19 And this is Breaking Bad, The Shields, The Wires, The Prannos and The Wire and, but he
0:32:22 goes into the history of it and Hill Street Blues is when this first, because they were
0:32:27 making this kind of serialized show and Stephen Boczko started having meetings with the directors.
0:32:30 When the director would come in, he would start having meetings saying, let me give,
0:32:35 set the tone. He was executive, nobody named him showrunner, but he decided that he was
0:32:42 going to, had to because of the nature of that show, exert upon the situation a kind
0:32:47 of tone, a control of the voice and, and tone because most shows have been more like law
0:32:51 and order was like the apotheosis of the other way around, which is each, each episode is
0:32:52 independent.
0:32:53 Yes.
0:32:54 Right.
0:32:59 But before Hill Street Blues, Hill Street Blues was one of the first shows that sort of combined
0:33:03 these elements for a cop show, I think, for sure. But, but the answer to your question
0:33:09 is about David and me and about anyone who wants to be a showrunner, which I’m happy
0:33:12 that showrunners officially in the dictionary now, like two years ago, it became.
0:33:13 I’m so glad.
0:33:14 I love that word.
0:33:19 It’s a real job title. Now, like, what do you do for a living showrunner? It’s learning
0:33:23 to be a producer. We have 150 people who work with us, but we’re who we’re in charge of.
0:33:28 And so it is quite different. But, but, but, you know, as you know, David and I directed
0:33:32 movies and we produced movies. So for us, it was a quite a natural thing because we’d
0:33:37 already, you know, at Rounders was as good an experience as you could have as a writer.
0:33:42 And there were still areas in which we didn’t have enough control over the voice. And what
0:33:47 we also knew was we’re probably never going to get that exact situation again. So we’d
0:33:50 better learn how to do these other parts of it. We’d better learn how to gain control
0:33:55 of the, you know, mechanisms of production means production means production.
0:34:01 That’s exactly right. And so we realized that we had to do that. But again, that goes goes
0:34:09 back to this question of a lot often a writer is takes solace while they’re whining about
0:34:14 not having control. They take solace and not having control because if you don’t have control,
0:34:17 you don’t take the blame somebody else as well. So if you’re comfortable, if you can
0:34:21 find a way to be comfortable with failure, which is a writer you have to or comfortable
0:34:25 in your mistakes, then you can be comfortable in wanting to be the final voice on what the
0:34:32 product is going to be. And we very early on decided, I’ll say this, when we work with
0:34:38 Steven Soderbergh, we are so glad to have his voice. If he’s directing them, man, what
0:34:43 a thrill to work with a genius, right? And what a thrill to have Soderbergh make us
0:34:44 better to this day.
0:34:45 This is OSHA 13.
0:34:48 Yeah, but also the girlfriend experience. And then he produced Solterman. I mean, if
0:34:53 Steven called tomorrow and said that he wanted us to just be screenwriters on a movie, he
0:34:57 was directing, we would jump at it because he’s going to make our stuff better. So but
0:35:02 if you’re comfortable in, if you’re comfortable taking the blame, if you’re comfortable in
0:35:08 a position of control, it makes you incredibly comfortable to then seed that control or to
0:35:14 share with somebody else. And so you can pick your spots then and decide. And also because
0:35:21 we’re able to make our own stuff, it’s the being in a situation where we are not the
0:35:26 final voice doesn’t make us chafe against it. I have plenty of that over here. So I don’t
0:35:28 have to chafe against it over here.
0:35:30 I’m happy to play this role in this situation.
0:35:31 Fantastic. I love it.
0:35:34 This is why we’re good producing other people’s movies. When it’s someone else’s vision, we’re
0:35:38 great at just helping them achieve their vision. Like Neil Berger, who’s an incredibly, incredibly
0:35:42 successful director, director of the pilot of Billions. We produced his first three movies.
0:35:47 And it’s like, Hey, Neil, we’re here to advise counsel, help. It’s your movie. Go run with
0:35:52 it. We’re comfortable in any of those different modes creatively. But I think the reason for
0:35:57 that is that we got comfortable early on with just doing the work and failing.
0:36:00 That’s right. We’ve been talking a lot about kind of managing ups, hierarchically, so
0:36:04 to speak. Now, turning it the other direction, like managing down in the writer’s room, you’ve
0:36:08 got like a lot of writers working with you. So how do you now navigate debates with all
0:36:12 those writers in the writer’s room? Like essentially you’re the show runners. And how do you make
0:36:14 it collaborative yet not a democracy at the same time?
0:36:17 Well, it isn’t a democracy.
0:36:21 So different show runners approach the question of the writer’s room differently. And some
0:36:27 who’ve come up through a writer’s room, rely on it in a very deep way, describe a writer’s
0:36:28 room.
0:36:33 A writer’s room is you get, let’s say six people in the room plus a show runner. There’s
0:36:37 a white board on the, and you start at the beginning of the season and it’s like, where
0:36:41 are we and how do we fill that in? And then each, but then it’s really hard to describe
0:36:45 a writer’s room mark because writer’s rooms become extensions of the way the show runners
0:36:48 see the world and the way they see the world of their shows.
0:36:52 So in theory, it’s a team of people writing the show together in some form.
0:36:57 In some form, meaning maybe everybody will write an episode. Almost all shows, the show
0:37:01 runner does the final pass on all the episodes, no matter whose name is going on.
0:37:01 Yeah, like the top edit.
0:37:08 On our show, though, David and I end up writing most of the show. And we have a great room
0:37:14 of men and women who help us really break the story arc of the season. And that is an
0:37:21 invaluable process. Tons of stuff comes out of the room about how the big arc of the season
0:37:25 should occur, about the twists and turns, about where characters, and that’s a months-long
0:37:31 process of talking. We haven’t yet found, and then when it comes to writing the scripts,
0:37:38 David and I, and then we have a writer named Adam Perlman, who’s now a co-executive producer.
0:37:43 He’s a number two person. And Adam writes a good amount of the show, too. But the truth
0:37:48 is, it is mostly us writing it. And I’m not saying that’s the way it should be on every
0:37:51 show. The voice of our show, the way that our show is, whether you like our show or
0:37:56 not, our show is canted in a certain way. It has a very clear voice that somehow the
0:37:57 two of us can do.
0:38:03 Instead, if someone on the team starts a script, their name goes on, and ours does
0:38:04 not.
0:38:07 So you’ve got a young hotshot writer, and they have an opportunity to write on a show.
0:38:10 This may be not as, let’s say, critical respect or whatever, but maybe it’s like they know
0:38:15 that they’ll actually get to write scripts. And what’s your pitch to them of why they
0:38:17 should come work for you, given that it’s a more constrained environment?
0:38:21 I’m not sure. Well, Adam was somebody who had a lot of job offers when he came on our
0:38:25 show in the second season. He started on the second season. He came into the room as just
0:38:31 a producer level, which is kind of a low-level position in terms of the hierarchy. He wasn’t
0:38:36 helping to be a showrunner, but he came in the room. He had incredibly good ideas. He
0:38:42 then wrote his first script that he wrote was very strong, strong enough that when someone’s
0:38:46 script came in that was not that strong, and David and I had to work on three other things.
0:38:49 We called him in and we said, “Hey, take a shot at rewriting this. Here are the things
0:38:50 that matter.”
0:38:55 We made extensive notes. Adam, go try to rewrite it. He rewrote that script. We then sat with
0:38:58 him and talked about how we were going to now rewrite it, but he did a really good job.
0:39:03 We kept being able to go to him, and by the next season, season three, he was running
0:39:07 the room when we weren’t there. We bumped him up to co-executive producer really quickly
0:39:14 and said, “Look, you’re our creative partner now. Help us do this.” If you’re really great,
0:39:18 if you’re great in the way that our show requires, someone may kill it on another show and just
0:39:23 not kill it on ours, the other thing is they get to be on set, watch how a show is made,
0:39:24 and be a part of it.
0:39:27 I’ll say one thing though to answer, another thing to ask your question, which is some
0:39:30 people have come into the writer’s room, talented, and I’ve found out they came into the writer’s
0:39:35 room because they like my podcast, but I’ve had to say to them, I’m this incredibly nurturing
0:39:39 and encouraging voice on the podcast, and I want you to know I am that for you and your
0:39:44 life, and I’ll help you get your next job, but you’re going to turn in a script and you’re
0:39:46 not going to get the voice on the podcast.
0:39:47 Oh my God, totally relate to this.
0:39:52 You’re going to get somebody saying to you, “Here’s what doesn’t work.” You have to know
0:39:55 that this is now you’re entering, this is, we’re in the major leagues here, we have
0:39:58 no choice because we’re playing the Red Sox tomorrow.
0:40:04 So we have to be ready to get in there and play the Red Sox.
0:40:06 So that’s, that has happened twice.
0:40:10 So one more question about Rounders, which goes to the kind of current state of the industry.
0:40:15 So Rounders was made in 1997, so that was the heyday of kind of the high status independent
0:40:19 movie, like medium budget, but like super high status.
0:40:20 Yeah, 14-5 we made that for, yeah.
0:40:23 Okay, yeah. And then, and then as you said, like it, you know, it had the thing, it wasn’t
0:40:27 a huge commercially hit out, but then it had this long, long life, you know, kind of plays
0:40:30 out through now and probably long into the future.
0:40:33 If that movie had not gotten made, and if a movie like that had not got made, just if
0:40:37 nobody had made kind of the definitive book or movie, and you and David entered the industry
0:40:43 today at age 25 or 30, whatever it is, and decided to make that movie, that project today,
0:40:44 what would be different about the process?
0:40:47 People constantly ask me how to break in to the business.
0:40:51 And my answer is, I have no idea, I did it 23 years ago.
0:40:52 I can’t help you.
0:40:55 I wish I could help tell you how to break in.
0:40:57 The conditions on the ground are entirely different.
0:41:01 The last thing I want to be is some general back in thing, ignoring what the sergeant says.
0:41:03 Like I have no idea.
0:41:07 I do know that what I know is that, well, I think it would resemble a movie that I love
0:41:10 and that launched many careers, which is Margin Call.
0:41:15 But whereas Rounders was a 14-5, I think Margin Call was made for a million too, and scraped
0:41:18 together by a commercial director, and they had limited sets.
0:41:20 Now, because Margin Call has a lot of similarities to Rounders.
0:41:24 It’s set in an insular world with a language of its own.
0:41:26 It doesn’t spell anything out for you.
0:41:27 You have to be willing to–
0:41:28 You have to be willing to roll with it.
0:41:29 We should describe it.
0:41:33 It’s kind of the definitive movie of the September 2008 financial meltdown.
0:41:36 It kind of takes place overnight, effectively in Lehman Brothers.
0:41:37 Yes.
0:41:38 A fictionalized version of Lehman Brothers.
0:41:41 And it’s actually a very chilling– people in finance look at it and say–
0:41:42 Goldman.
0:41:43 Well, it’s Goldman, right?
0:41:44 Because they survive.
0:41:50 Because it’s set at Goldman, and it’s about the willingness of gold– and they never
0:41:51 say it’s Goldman.
0:41:55 It’s about the willingness of– it’s about a decision that Goldman Sachs made to get
0:41:57 rid of their toxic assets.
0:42:02 But I think that movie is really analogous to Rounders because it is doing a bunch of
0:42:05 the stuff that we did.
0:42:10 You have to just catch on to the lingo, and you have to understand what the stakes are.
0:42:15 But he had to– look, they made that movie for a 10th of what we made Rounders for.
0:42:16 They had Kevin Spacey.
0:42:17 They had Jeremy Irons.
0:42:18 Jack Herquinto was in it.
0:42:19 And he was starting to become famous.
0:42:20 That’s right.
0:42:21 So they had Top End.
0:42:22 They put the Top End people.
0:42:23 But it was still– they had to make it for like a million and a half bucks.
0:42:24 A million and two, maybe.
0:42:25 OK.
0:42:30 It’s much harder to make those mid– those sort of mid-budget 14 to 25 or $30 million
0:42:31 movies.
0:42:32 The Netflix does it, right?
0:42:33 Right.
0:42:38 You can do it at Netflix now, which is probably where it would happen.
0:42:40 But– or you would try to tell the story in a novelistic way on television.
0:42:41 Well, that was a great question.
0:42:46 So would you pitch today– young David and young Brian show up– would you pitch Rounders
0:42:48 for television or for a film?
0:42:49 No.
0:42:51 You would pitch the world in the underground card rooms for television.
0:42:52 OK.
0:42:53 Because I think a lot of that– that’s where this stuff lives.
0:42:57 And that would have been, I think, a fascinating thing to see also.
0:42:59 David and I grew up watching movies.
0:43:05 We loved television, but our shared language, our lingua franca, was movies.
0:43:08 We were quoting movies at each other from when we were little kids.
0:43:10 We would watch movies 20 times.
0:43:16 We watched Stripes Together at least 20 times and Diner and many more movies where they
0:43:20 became the way we communicated.
0:43:23 And so it made sense to us to go make movies.
0:43:30 Since then, things like The Sopranos, West Wing, Larry Sanders, Mad Men showed up and
0:43:31 showed us the way.
0:43:35 They lit the way for us to think about television.
0:43:36 That’s actually huge.
0:43:37 We always talk about this.
0:43:39 Mark and I television is so much better than movies.
0:43:40 It’s unbelievable.
0:43:42 Well, I think it’s actually– it’s the best shows there are novels.
0:43:43 What?
0:43:44 I think we all think about it.
0:43:45 Or a series of novels.
0:43:46 I call it visual literature.
0:43:47 A movie is still more like a play.
0:43:48 It’s visual literature.
0:43:49 These shows are like thousand-page novels.
0:43:50 We definitely think about it.
0:43:52 We definitely think about it that way.
0:43:56 We’re trying to tell novelistic stories, deepening characters in challenging situations.
0:43:57 I call it visual literature.
0:43:58 It’s exactly what it is.
0:43:59 I love that term.
0:44:03 When you came up in the music industry, I watched– I was involved in the internet.
0:44:07 I wasn’t involved in Napster, but I knew the guys really well.
0:44:11 We both watched from various professional perches, kind of the music industry confront
0:44:14 digital distribution and basically just like implode.
0:44:15 Yeah, get run over.
0:44:16 I didn’t confront it.
0:44:18 Unfortunately, they didn’t confront it.
0:44:22 They just stood there and got– they were like, they just got run over.
0:44:23 Kablooey, right?
0:44:24 I mean, like France.
0:44:25 Like France.
0:44:26 In the deuce, man.
0:44:31 You know, they were like, should we pick up our guns and their rifles?
0:44:32 No.
0:44:33 Let’s just lay down.
0:44:36 That’s a comment brought to you entirely.
0:44:37 No, Mark.
0:44:38 You signed up.
0:44:39 You laughed.
0:44:42 You completely laughed.
0:44:45 So I fully– I’ll just confess, I fully expected the same thing was going to happen to TV.
0:44:49 Like, you know, Napster for music, BitTorrent for TV, it’s just like it’s just obvious.
0:44:50 Same thing’s going to happen to TV.
0:44:51 It’s just going to get run over.
0:44:54 And then the most like amazing thing in the world happened, which is the exact opposite
0:44:55 thing happened.
0:44:58 The exact opposite happened, which is like this– like the creative explosion of all
0:44:59 time.
0:45:00 Yes.
0:45:03 Like the– and you’ve probably seen, you know, John Landgraf, who runs FX, has always
0:45:04 talked about it.
0:45:05 He’s a brilliant man.
0:45:06 Brilliant man.
0:45:08 You’re a great programmer, but, you know, he talks about the content bubble, the TV
0:45:09 bubble.
0:45:12 And it’s like, I don’t know, every year now, it’s like 500 original scripted dramas are
0:45:13 getting made.
0:45:15 I think it’s 560 or something insane.
0:45:16 Yeah.
0:45:18 And so, and he’s been calling this a bubble the whole time, but like it keeps expanding.
0:45:21 And I mean, then we all get to, you know, you get to make it, but like we get to watch
0:45:22 it.
0:45:24 You know, I really like routinely see shows now where I’m just like, you know, 20 years
0:45:26 ago, this would have been the best show in the entire history of town.
0:45:30 The fact that “Mindhunter and the Crown” came out like in the same year on Netflix is amazing
0:45:31 to me.
0:45:32 Those would have been the best show of an era.
0:45:33 Ever.
0:45:34 Ever.
0:45:35 Ever.
0:45:36 Like the crown is as good as you can make something.
0:45:37 And like–
0:45:38 I keep trying to make Mark watch it.
0:45:39 He hasn’t–
0:45:40 I can give you the language by which to watch it.
0:45:41 So I’m totally not interested in monarchy.
0:45:42 I hate it.
0:45:43 And nothing about that is interesting to me.
0:45:45 The show is just the most beautifully written and shot.
0:45:46 I agree with you.
0:45:47 And acted show that there is.
0:45:48 He doesn’t believe me.
0:45:49 So here’s my question.
0:45:51 Let’s assume it is the medium of our time.
0:45:53 And let’s assume it kind of keeps expanding so that this all makes sense.
0:45:57 But the amazing thing is, it seems like the more shows get made, it seems like the average
0:45:59 quality level is rising.
0:46:01 And you would expect, I think, the opposite.
0:46:03 You’d expect the average quality level to fall because you’d expect to run out of talent
0:46:04 at some point.
0:46:05 I agree.
0:46:07 And so where is all this talent coming from?
0:46:08 I have no idea.
0:46:09 Okay.
0:46:12 So were there just all these geniuses out there who just never had the opportunity to
0:46:13 do it and now they do?
0:46:16 Or is there something happening in the industry where people are being trained in a different
0:46:17 way?
0:46:18 It’s just the love of television.
0:46:19 So it perpetuates itself.
0:46:23 And we might be in a golden age where artists are apprenticing in some way for other artists
0:46:26 and learning and figuring it out.
0:46:30 You know, I have the luxury not to think about the 560 shows or to appreciate what Landgraf
0:46:34 says and know he’s a brilliant guy without having to be cowed by that or feel anyway
0:46:37 about it because I just want to, I still go back to the same thing.
0:46:40 I just want to get in the room and get the feeling I get when I’m making the thing.
0:46:44 I want to be walking on the set and see Damien and Paul and Maggie in Asia and be able to
0:46:45 work with them.
0:46:53 And we’ve just found a way to make decisions still based on our curiosity and our obsession.
0:46:57 So if we’re interested in the US Open in 1991 and Jimmy Connors, we’ll go make a documentary
0:47:01 about it because we’ll really enjoy the process of making it and we have faith that there
0:47:02 will be people who will want to see it.
0:47:05 I was thinking my answer to Mark’s question, I’m trying to make him watch this movie Gully
0:47:06 Boy.
0:47:07 I haven’t seen it.
0:47:11 It’s a Bollywood movie that’s produced by Nas, but to me the point is that technology
0:47:14 has democratized the access to watching all this visual literature.
0:47:15 I don’t understand.
0:47:20 Ben is not able to make him watch something produced by Nas that makes no sense to me.
0:47:23 Ben and I have the kind of partnership where we’re able to compliment.
0:47:26 Actually, I wanted to ask you, that was the other question I wanted to ask you.
0:47:29 So you have been partners now with David for how long?
0:47:30 Over 20 years.
0:47:31 It’s an equal partnership.
0:47:32 It has always been from the beginning.
0:47:33 Okay, equal partnership.
0:47:34 Fully 50/50.
0:47:35 Beautiful.
0:47:38 So how do you, if somebody comes to you and says like, I want to have a partnership
0:47:39 like that.
0:47:40 I want to have a career where I have a partner like that.
0:47:41 How do you do that?
0:47:43 Well, do you remember when the four of us first, do you remember when the four of us
0:47:44 first met?
0:47:47 How funny it seemed to the bus when we, you, Ben and David, we were sitting there and
0:47:54 it was just like, this is a rare thing to have two sets of people who just, in the same
0:47:58 way it makes sense when someone sees you and Ben and talks to you for five minutes.
0:48:02 When someone sees David and me and they talk to us for five minutes, the whole thing just
0:48:03 kind of makes sense.
0:48:08 In the ways that we can finish each other’s sentences, but also are different in some significant
0:48:09 ways.
0:48:14 When someone else heard us talking, we’re maybe very similar, but the two of us understand
0:48:16 the ways in which we’re complementary to each other.
0:48:22 The key is to really regard the other person as incredibly smart, to really always know
0:48:26 that their motive is to make the work better.
0:48:32 So much of the stuff sounds like platitudes, but like trying your hardest to get your emotions
0:48:34 out of these decisions and being rational.
0:48:38 I think the key to having a good partnership is not about looking for the partner, it’s
0:48:42 about how can you make yourself be the best version of yourself in a way that complements
0:48:48 this other person that who you respect and whose work you admire.
0:48:50 And so that’s all hard work in life, right?
0:48:57 It’s the same thing in a marriage or any kind of a kind of a partnership, but it’s about
0:49:02 all of us, even the most rational, smartest among us, have emotional reactions sometimes.
0:49:06 And the question is, okay, it’s not to not have an emotional reaction, but it’s to not
0:49:09 let the emotional reaction dictate your response.
0:49:17 So if that means you know that you’re the worst of you, instantly reacts with anger,
0:49:22 then find a way to say, hey, I don’t want to react with anger, I’m going to go take
0:49:24 a run and then I’m going to come back.
0:49:27 And this is stuff you figure out over a long period of time.
0:49:31 But the more you know that the success or failure of a partnership is based entirely
0:49:35 on how you comport yourself, the better off that you’ll be.
0:49:36 It’s not the other guy’s fault.
0:49:37 It’s not the other guy’s fault.
0:49:38 Don’t you think of it that way?
0:49:40 I am curious what Mark’s take on this.
0:49:42 What is your take on that?
0:49:46 No, so the way I describe it, by the way, this comes up a lot in our business, Ben and
0:49:50 I have this kind of partnership, lucky for me, but also there’s a lot of founder and
0:49:51 then CEO.
0:49:54 Like sometimes we have founder CEOs, which is like your showrunner model, but sometimes
0:49:57 we have a founder and then there’s a CEO who’s brought in or promoted inside the company
0:50:00 and then they have to be part, you know, if you want the magic of the founder and the
0:50:02 company will well run, they need to have that kind of partnership.
0:50:05 And so when I always tell them, I kind of try to put a point on it and it’s kind of
0:50:10 say it has to be more important to each of you that it has to be more important than
0:50:16 each of you that the other one has to be more important that the other one gets to make
0:50:19 the decision than that you get to prove yourself right.
0:50:21 And you have to both have that attitude.
0:50:24 Like if one of you has that attitude, then you just, that person’s just going to run
0:50:25 over the other ones.
0:50:27 If you both have the attitude where your reflexive view is, you know what?
0:50:28 This is a debate.
0:50:29 It’s an argument.
0:50:30 It’s 50/50.
0:50:31 It’s a toss up, which a lot of these things are.
0:50:33 We’re going to do it your way.
0:50:36 If both people have that as their default point of view, then you can navigate through
0:50:37 these things.
0:50:40 And then you get in the positive version of the deadlock, which is like, no, let’s do
0:50:41 it your way.
0:50:42 Okay.
0:50:43 Now we have a healthy conversation.
0:50:48 Sometimes there’ll be emails back and forth about a thing in an editing where one of us
0:50:52 will have an idea and the other one will say, my instinct was to go the other way with
0:50:53 it.
0:50:54 But you know what?
0:50:55 Let’s, let’s, let’s do it that way.
0:50:57 And it’s not even a, it has to not be a move.
0:51:01 I think you have to actually be like, there was a thing yesterday.
0:51:06 I, where I, I saw something and I had a, um, a notion about it and David sent me back.
0:51:08 Um, well, there are a few different things that are good.
0:51:13 So normally when we’re doing edits on, when we’re comment, making notes on a cut in order
0:51:17 to do edits, our two assistants, we share two assists.
0:51:18 Not like one’s his assistant and one’s mine.
0:51:23 We have two assistants who help the two of us normally there on the conversation so that
0:51:27 they can then collate the notes and give them to the editor before we go talk to the editor.
0:51:31 But if there’s something that suddenly is going to, we see really differently, we just
0:51:33 immediately take it to a private communication, right?
0:51:37 We take the, we take the audience out of it.
0:51:38 We never talked about this, but we just do it.
0:51:41 We take the audience out of it because let’s not perform, not performing and we’re also
0:51:43 not worried about being judged.
0:51:46 But so yesterday was one of those things where we just saw one little tiny moment slightly
0:51:47 differently.
0:51:48 I wrote this thing like, I think we should do this.
0:51:51 And then Dave wrote me separately and said, you know, I don’t, I don’t see the scene that
0:51:52 way.
0:51:53 Here’s what I think is going on.
0:51:56 And I still saw the scene the way that I saw it, but I just immediately went, no, he’s
0:51:57 right.
0:51:58 Yeah.
0:51:59 Let’s just do that.
0:52:00 It makes total sense.
0:52:03 Like let’s go through the next bunch of iterations of the, of the cut with it in like that.
0:52:06 And the, in the hope that I’m just going to come around to seeing it that way.
0:52:09 Or let’s show it to some, some other people this way and let’s see what, what comes out
0:52:10 of it.
0:52:12 It would have been very easy.
0:52:14 And I see a lot of people fall into the trap of trying to argue.
0:52:17 Well, I look for as many, by the way I think about it is I look for as many chances as
0:52:19 I can to let him make the decision, right?
0:52:21 And then, and then to your point, like if I real feel as a consequence of that, I build
0:52:22 up so much trust.
0:52:23 That’s right.
0:52:28 If I still strong about something, that’s a really great point.
0:52:32 This is important to attach to that, which is because all the time Dave is willing to
0:52:34 say to me, let’s do that.
0:52:37 When he wrote me and said like, Hey, I think this is different than you think it is.
0:52:41 It was just so easy to go, well, yeah, of course, dude, go, let’s do that thing.
0:52:44 Because we’re always looking to let it be the way I want it.
0:52:45 As I am.
0:52:50 So I would say I’m certain none of that is a tactic or a strategy with Dave and me.
0:52:54 It just so happens to be the way that the two of us interact.
0:52:57 A quick question on this, though, just from like an advice point of view, because you
0:53:03 talk about this, how do you manage your own personal psychology around anger and creative
0:53:08 impulse and ego kind of in the, in this process, even beyond the partnership?
0:53:09 Well meditation helps.
0:53:14 It’s so, I mean, I know, as I said before, some of this stuff sounds so reductive and
0:53:18 so much like platitudes, but you know, I love that Tim Ferriss has said out of the whatever
0:53:23 a thousand people that he’s interviewed, who he views as highly successful creatives, like
0:53:27 92% of them meditate.
0:53:28 And I don’t think that’s just buy-in.
0:53:30 I don’t think it’s just that everyone’s decided to buy-in.
0:53:31 So I’m in the 8%.
0:53:32 Yeah, I know.
0:53:33 I’m like, Mr. Anti-Meditation.
0:53:34 I’m not into anti-meditation.
0:53:35 Anti-meditation.
0:53:37 Well, I’ve never, I’ve never, I’m not philosophically anti-meditation.
0:53:38 I’m personally anti-meditation.
0:53:43 I cannot imagine sitting still with my own thoughts for longer than about 30 seconds.
0:53:44 I couldn’t either.
0:53:45 Right.
0:53:46 So this is my question.
0:53:50 Talk to me as a practical person who’s interested in performance and not particularly interested
0:53:51 in introspection.
0:53:52 Like, how would I?
0:53:53 Well, I do the simplest kind.
0:53:55 I do Transcendental Meditation.
0:53:58 So it’s the easiest one because it’s just quietly saying a mantra to yourself for 20
0:53:59 minutes, right?
0:54:00 Yeah, define Transcendental Meditation.
0:54:01 Well, that’s what it is.
0:54:07 Transcendental Meditation is you, because I had ADHD person, I can’t sit still.
0:54:12 I have to check all that stuff, except I really do this twice a day, 20 minutes.
0:54:15 And what I found, and it’s just personal.
0:54:20 But what I found was it like reduced the physical manifestations of anxiety by a lot.
0:54:24 And when you get, for me, when I get anxiety out of the equation, I just think more clearly
0:54:25 and more creatively.
0:54:29 So it’s, and it’s not, I’ll say the other thing is people build it up too much, right?
0:54:31 It’s not some magic pill.
0:54:37 It doesn’t like immediately make you, you’re not suddenly becombed, but it just kind of
0:54:43 takes like a little bit of the tumult out.
0:54:48 And a lot of forms of meditation require you to force out the thoughts as you said, or
0:54:52 require you to be introspective, or require you to focus on your breathing.
0:54:56 Transcendental Meditation, all you’re doing is sort of allowing this mantra to be said
0:54:57 over and over.
0:54:58 And if thoughts come in, that’s fine.
0:55:02 You just kind of let the thoughts come in, and then you kind of return to this mantra.
0:55:04 And I’ll say the results for me.
0:55:09 So I was hugely skeptical, but I was at a point where I was feeling like I needed something.
0:55:13 I had too much agitation.
0:55:17 And so in reading about, I read David Lynch’s book, Catching the Big Fish, and a couple
0:55:18 of other books.
0:55:19 And it made me interested enough.
0:55:22 And I went and sat down with Bob Roth, who runs the Lynch Foundation, and I said, look,
0:55:24 I think you’re probably a cult.
0:55:28 I think that I’m an atheist.
0:55:32 You know, I know these are like Sanskrit words that have some holiness to them.
0:55:34 So none of that stuff works for me.
0:55:37 So talk to me about why I should even be sitting here.
0:55:40 And you know, Bob was like, well, why don’t you read this book and why don’t you read
0:55:42 this study and why don’t you look at these EEGs?
0:55:47 And let’s talk about what this tool does in terms of affecting the loops in your brain
0:55:48 and your brainwaves.
0:55:54 And in through that conversation, I was like, well, okay, let me, you know, I’ll learn.
0:56:02 And within, I’ll say like within two months, I noticed in my family noticed that I was
0:56:04 just in a much better place.
0:56:09 And again, it doesn’t mean I’m never a dick.
0:56:10 Like we’re all a dick sometimes.
0:56:14 It doesn’t mean I’m never short with anyone or that I’m never worried.
0:56:15 Of course I am.
0:56:16 I’m a human being.
0:56:19 But it means that I can manage it in a much better way.
0:56:25 And if the only thing I got out of it was I was sitting and meditating and when you’re
0:56:33 not trying to think of ideas, but like I’ve solved many tricky story problems.
0:56:37 I’ve come out of a meditation and just kind of had the answer show up.
0:56:41 Now that that could just be a function of like, I turned everything off and I, I consciously
0:56:43 wasn’t thinking about it.
0:56:45 And so I allowed this.
0:56:46 That’s great.
0:56:47 Perfect.
0:56:54 How, whatever it is, it’s not surprising to me that so many of us who are high achievers
0:57:01 aggressive in going after what we want, willing to take risks, that finding some tool that
0:57:05 gives you some enforced break from that.
0:57:09 It’s not surprising to me that that then when you then come out of that, you’re kind of
0:57:10 firing again.
0:57:14 That’s what makes sense to me.
0:57:15 Sir, who’s Bob?
0:57:16 Sir, who’s Bob?
0:57:17 Bob Roth runs David Lynch Foundation.
0:57:20 David Lynch Foundation is like at the center of transcendental meditation.
0:57:21 Lynch had the side.
0:57:22 David, the real David Lynch.
0:57:23 The director, David Lynch.
0:57:24 David Lynch is the biggest.
0:57:28 David Lynch is the reason transcendental meditation is popular in America.
0:57:32 Lynch credits TM with making him the artist that he is.
0:57:35 David Lynch just for Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet.
0:57:36 Oh yeah, all that stuff.
0:57:39 He started doing like 40 years ago or 50 years ago and he wanted to start a thing that would
0:57:42 give it to kids and post-traumatic stress people.
0:57:47 So he started this foundation and the guy who runs it and who’s like sort of the kind
0:57:49 of the head of TM in America is this guy Bob Roth.
0:57:53 The best part of that story, by the way, though, is that you were literally arguing, to Mark’s
0:57:56 point about this tent, because Mark essentially set it up as a tension between performance
0:58:00 and introspection and you’re essentially arguing that introspection leads to better performance.
0:58:03 Well, I know I would argue that it’s not introspection.
0:58:06 My journaling is definitely, a certain kind of introspection serves me, but meditation
0:58:13 is like the calming of the thoughts or the stilling of it, or it’s just a respite in
0:58:14 a way.
0:58:19 It’s a respite from the perpetual thinking machine thing.
0:58:23 I think the idea is that you have these thoughts, these pattern thoughts, and there are some
0:58:26 thoughts that you know you have, but then there are these like patterns of thoughts
0:58:32 that you have that are probably a little bit disruptive, but they’re loop.
0:58:36 And when you start to say this mantra, you’re interrupting, right, suddenly that’s what
0:58:40 the sound is and the other thing just dissipates and you get calm.
0:58:45 I’m not trying to think about my life when I’m meditating, I’m just trying to take a
0:58:46 break.
0:58:47 Yeah.
0:58:48 Okay.
0:58:50 Let’s spend the last few minutes just talking about billions specifically.
0:58:54 As friends, we’re about to go into some light spoiler alerts, particularly from the last
0:58:55 and early seasons.
0:58:58 So if you haven’t seen them already, you’ve been warned.
0:59:02 I have to ask this question because you know that scene from as good as it gets where there’s
0:59:05 a female character that goes to Jack Nicholson and you just say, “How?”
0:59:08 I just, I sacrifice take away honor and what’s the exact line.
0:59:10 Well, actually I was thinking of another thing.
0:59:11 I have not seen this movie.
0:59:12 Oh, you haven’t.
0:59:13 You guys have to describe.
0:59:14 You guys have to describe.
0:59:16 I thought you were going to say the one where I think of a man and then I take away reason
0:59:17 and…
0:59:18 Yes.
0:59:19 Well, that was his response to her.
0:59:21 What I have is, “How do you write women so fucking well?”
0:59:22 Well, that’s his answer.
0:59:23 Yes.
0:59:27 I disagree wildly disagree with his answer, which is good to hear.
0:59:34 But the best characters on billions are quite honestly the female and transgender characters
0:59:40 of Maggie Sif, who plays Wendy Rhodes and Asia Kate Dillon, who plays Taylor.
0:59:43 I mean, I want to ask you, how do you do this incredible character development for these
0:59:44 female characters?
0:59:48 You know, the hardest questions to answer are the, “How do you do the thing?”
0:59:53 Because that is, that’s the part that’s not…
0:59:55 There is no intellectual answer to that question.
1:00:01 That’s the part of it that either makes you someone who does this or doesn’t do it.
1:00:05 The most fun part for me is when I’m sitting on my couch, actually writing the scenes,
1:00:06 right?
1:00:14 I have music blasting, able to put the computer, the laptop actually on my lap, and I’m able
1:00:16 to sort of fly.
1:00:19 And that’s the part that isn’t intellectual at all.
1:00:22 It’s the result of all the intellectual work you’ve ever done.
1:00:23 It’s the result of your curiosity.
1:00:27 It’s the result of everything you’ve read, of everything that you’ve watched, of everything
1:00:29 that you’ve been a part of.
1:00:34 And then you want to just allow it to happen.
1:00:38 And so we honor these characters.
1:00:44 And Wendy Rhodes, when we invented that character and then wrote it, we certainly know who
1:00:49 that person is very well, but you have to make these fictional characters feel incredibly
1:00:54 real to you and you want to write them smarter than you are.
1:00:57 And that’s the only thing I can say is we want every character in Billions to be smarter
1:00:58 than we are.
1:01:03 So a quick question about Taylor as a character because Billions, the next season is now dropping.
1:01:11 You ended the last season with a tension between the head of Axe Capital and his protege, Taylor,
1:01:13 including their own firm.
1:01:18 And I so relate to Taylor’s character, like you won’t believe, there’s a sense of like
1:01:19 unbounded ambition.
1:01:20 Are you trying to tell Mark something right now?
1:01:22 No, no, no, no, not in that sense.
1:01:23 This happened before.
1:01:28 There’s this unbounded ambition with Taylor and Axe initially nurtures it and then essentially
1:01:29 squashes it.
1:01:34 I’m dying to know, like, Taylor’s a really interesting archetype actually, both that
1:01:39 Taylor’s transgender and that you have this essential universal archetype in every organization.
1:01:41 Tell me how you think about Taylor as a character.
1:01:47 Well, Taylor’s just the most highly competent person and is a brilliant person.
1:01:54 And if this is a long novelistic piece, we’re still sort of at the middle, the beginning
1:01:56 of the middle of the story.
1:01:59 And so that kind of person has to be tempted, right?
1:02:00 Has to be tested.
1:02:06 If you don’t test the morality of those kind of characters, how do you know whether they’re
1:02:07 really moral or not?
1:02:09 They don’t get lost for a little while.
1:02:10 How do they become found?
1:02:13 And so that’s where we find Taylor in this season.
1:02:14 I don’t want to spoil anything.
1:02:15 Okay.
1:02:16 I have another quick one.
1:02:17 I’m just dying to ask.
1:02:18 And we’ll lightly round these and then we’ll wrap up.
1:02:21 I want to ask you about some of the music choices you make and one specific one.
1:02:27 Last season, one of the most compelling raw music choices you made is in a scene for those
1:02:28 who haven’t caught up all the way.
1:02:33 I’ll just give a little teaser where Axe essentially is let out of a situation where
1:02:36 he was in trouble and he’s coming back to his pad and it’s literally, you guys portray
1:02:40 it visually as a completely raw bachelor pad.
1:02:42 And the song was “Street Punk.”
1:02:43 Vince Staples, yeah.
1:02:44 Oh my God.
1:02:46 I fucking love that moment.
1:02:50 It so stripped him bare down to just, he’s a street punk.
1:02:52 Tell me about that decision and that choice.
1:02:57 I mean, David and I choose all the music for the show together and we’re both music fanatics
1:03:03 and trade music all the time and so, and we put music in the scripts.
1:03:07 So when we’re writing that script, we’re going back and forth about what it should be.
1:03:08 Is it hip hop?
1:03:10 If it is, who is it and why?
1:03:13 We had Vince Staples on the list since the end of the first season, I think, when his
1:03:15 first record came out.
1:03:18 “North, North” is what I thought we would use from the beginning.
1:03:24 But that moment, you know, that moment people really understand what happens when Axe gets
1:03:25 in that hot tub.
1:03:27 And again, that was in the script.
1:03:30 That was what our goal was and then we had to work incredibly hard with our brilliant
1:03:40 editor who figured out how to make that sequence work the way we’d had it in our heads.
1:03:45 Marnie Mayer, who edited that episode, really worked incredibly hard to build that sequence
1:03:49 so that it matched and then exceeded what we had written.
1:03:51 And Marnie’s been with the show from the very beginning.
1:03:54 She and an editor named Naomi Garrity have been with the show from the start and are
1:03:58 really and truly our creative partners there, the guardians of the tone of the show with
1:03:59 us.
1:04:00 That’s great.
1:04:01 That was the last one.
1:04:02 And then we can wrap up.
1:04:04 So in season one, does this count as a spoiler alert?
1:04:05 Because it’s so early in the season.
1:04:06 I’ll just give it a high level.
1:04:07 We’ll decide.
1:04:08 Okay.
1:04:12 There’s a scene where you essentially set up Axe.
1:04:15 The entire audience thinks that he’s going to cheat on his wife.
1:04:19 And I spent that entire episode on the edge of my seat worried that he was going to cheat
1:04:20 on his wife.
1:04:21 This is an acceptable spoiler.
1:04:22 This is a spoiler.
1:04:23 This is totally a spoiler.
1:04:24 But it’s an acceptable one.
1:04:25 100%.
1:04:26 I don’t know how you can conceivably think of this.
1:04:27 It’s season one.
1:04:28 Okay, fine, guys.
1:04:29 But just a quick thing on that.
1:04:30 That was obviously deliberate.
1:04:32 Tell me about the decision making behind that.
1:04:37 So what I was saying, the thing about sitting on the couch writing and how that is this
1:04:41 incredibly free process, then you have to rewrite.
1:04:43 And then you have to think about how it fits into the whole.
1:04:48 So the whole gag is to write with total freedom and then rewrite with total clarity.
1:04:54 And so when we’re thinking about whether a character will behave in way A or way B,
1:04:55 we’re thinking about what they would do in the moment.
1:04:57 And then we’re thinking about the ramifications of that.
1:05:03 So if the character did decision A, well, what does that then say about that character
1:05:05 as we go through the rest of the series?
1:05:09 Which will leave us in a place where there’s more optionality.
1:05:13 And it’s clear in that case, which one would leave us with more optionality.
1:05:14 That’s great.
1:05:15 Okay.
1:05:16 Oh, can I say one thing though?
1:05:18 One of the great things about something like this is that someone like Mark can do the work
1:05:21 he does and then I can do the work that I do.
1:05:26 And if there’s some sort of a mutual sort of fascination with the work, you get to connect
1:05:27 with people on that.
1:05:31 And that is one of the sort of unintended joys of the work that I get to do.
1:05:36 And so that’s why I was happy to fly out here and do this podcast because we’ve gotten to
1:05:39 know each other over the last few years and it’s been a real pleasure.
1:05:40 Thanks for having me here.
1:05:41 Thank you, Brian.
1:05:43 Thank you so much for joining the A6NZ podcast, Brian, and for coming out here.
1:05:44 We really appreciate it.
1:05:46 And Billions in the next season is now out.
1:05:47 March 17th.
1:05:48 Thanks, Brian.
1:05:49 So happy to be here.
1:05:50 Thanks, guys.
1:05:51 Thank you.
1:05:53 And by the way, people may not know, I actually play on the show.
1:05:57 I actually play wigs under a rubber mask.
1:05:59 And so that’s why you never see me in a cameo.
1:06:00 I thought we weren’t supposed to have sex.
1:06:01 I’m sorry, everybody.
1:06:02 Speaking of spoilers.
1:06:03 Oh, my God.
1:06:04 This is one of my favorite characters.
1:06:04 Well, thank you.
1:06:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]