#484 – Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming

0:00:05 The following is a conversation with Dan Hauser, a legendary video game creator,
0:00:11 co-founder of Rockstar Games, and the creative force behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead
0:00:16 Redemption series, which includes some of the best-selling games of all time and some of the
0:00:23 greatest games of all time. Both Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 has some of the deepest,
0:00:29 most complex, and heart-wrenching characters and storylines ever created in video games.
0:00:37 Dan has started a new company, Absurd Ventures, great name, that is creating some incredible new
0:00:43 worlds in multiple forms, including books, comic books, audio series, and yes, video games.
0:00:50 That includes A Better Paradise, which is a dystopian near-future world with a super-intelligent AI,
0:00:59 American Caper, which is an insanely chaotic, violent, dark, satirical world, and Absurdiverse,
0:01:05 which is a comedic action-adventure world. I’m excited to explore all three of these.
0:01:13 I have spent hundreds of hours in worlds that Dan has helped create, so this conversation was an
0:01:19 incredible honor for me. And on top of that, Dan and I talked a lot after and in the days since,
0:01:27 and he has been just a wonderful human being. I’m just at a loss of words. I feel like the luckiest kid
0:01:29 in the world.
0:01:33 And now, a quick few-second mention of these sponsors. Check them out in the description,
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0:02:39 All right, let’s go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Box. You probably know them.
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0:06:30 This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. We talk extensively
0:06:38 in this episode with Dan Hauser about his writing process. And boy, it’s a torturous journey as everybody
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0:11:21 And now, dear friends, here’s Dan Hauser.
0:11:37 You’ve helped create some of the most incredible characters, stories and open worlds and video game
0:11:45 history. But when you grew up in the late 70s and 80s, open world video games wasn’t a thing. So you’ve
0:11:52 credited literature and film as early inspiration. So let’s talk about film first, if we can.
0:11:53 Sure.
0:11:58 What are some of the candidates for the greatest films of all time? Maybe films that were highly
0:12:00 influential on you. I mean, Godfather.
0:12:07 Well, I think for me, probably Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1, but I love both of them. But I love
0:12:14 the divided story in Godfather 2. And as a migrant, I used to live in Soho. I love the bits in Little
0:12:20 Italy and I love the sections in Sicily. So I think, and the bit at Ellis Island is just one of the best
0:12:27 shots in all of cinema. When you see little Vito turning up in Ellis Island and you get that shot,
0:12:32 it’s amazing. It gives you a really good cinematic sense of what it must have been like to arrive in
0:12:32 America.
0:12:38 How much of the greatness of Godfather do you think is the writing? How much is the
0:12:42 cinematography and how much is the acting? You got De Niro, you got Young, Pacino.
0:12:48 Well, Coppola started as a screenwriter. So I think he wrote, at least co-wrote the script. So it’s
0:12:52 almost like the writing directing almost become the same thing. Well, it’s one of those films,
0:12:58 both of them are those films, which I was thinking about this idea of a perfect film where everything’s
0:13:03 good. Where the acting’s seminal, where the writing’s seminal, where the music is seminal,
0:13:09 where the shots are so memorable, where the scenes define what you think about things. It’s impossible
0:13:11 to think about the mafia and not think about the Godfather.
0:13:17 What about the pacing? It is a bit slow. You have movies like 2001 Space Odyssey, slow.
0:13:18 Yes.
0:13:22 It used to be, back in my day, it used to be slower.
0:13:30 Life got faster. I think as we moved from the ’70s into the ’80s, into the ’90s,
0:13:36 people had seen so many films, they just started to edit films faster. And people understood cinematic
0:13:41 storytelling so much that you could do things much quicker. You could show a look and just,
0:13:45 that meant you realised that person was going to betray the other person. They just edited films much
0:13:51 quicker. But I quite like the slowness. I think these days with, with modern, you know, high-quality
0:13:54 televisions, you have to necessarily watch these films in one sitting, particularly when you’re
0:13:57 re-watching them. So it doesn’t bother me that they’re long and slow.
0:14:00 Trey Lockerbie: Speaking of faster, life getting faster,
0:14:06 I’m sure another influential movie was Goodfellas, Scorsese. That’s faster, right?
0:14:06 Trey Lockerbie: Yes.
0:14:09 Trey Lockerbie: A mixture of crime and humour.
0:14:14 Trey Lockerbie: And almost like an open-world game, in some ways, in that it’s this slice of life,
0:14:21 you see, you know, I think that probably changed cinema at the sort of tail end of the ’80s,
0:14:27 early ’90s, more than any other film. And it’s so iconic. In some ways, I prefer Casino,
0:14:31 but the invention is really in Goodfellas. I love the end of Casino. You know,
0:14:37 the use of voiceover, the way you saw them being criminals and being normal people, you know,
0:14:40 it changed everything. I mean, the Sopranos obviously is completely inspired by Goodfellas.
0:14:46 Trey Lockerbie: Yeah. Casino has, first of all, the character of Sharon Stone. I mean, everything.
0:14:47 Trey Lockerbie: The look, the clothes.
0:14:47 Trey Lockerbie: Yeah.
0:14:48 Trey Lockerbie: The music.
0:14:51 Trey Lockerbie: I would say one of the most memorable moments
0:14:57 in film for me is the meeting in the desert. I mean, it’s just the drama building up to that.
0:14:58 Trey Lockerbie: Big another hole.
0:15:01 Trey Lockerbie: Yeah. The environment, the city, speaking of open-world and
0:15:05 creating a character from the city. It’s one of the great Vegas films.
0:15:09 Trey Lockerbie: I think the great Vegas film. The bits that I always,
0:15:13 that I love at the end when everything’s wrapping up. And on the one hand, you see
0:15:18 the Robert De Niro character, he’s still good at making money. They let him return to normal life.
0:15:25 But then you get that brilliant scene when all of the mob bosses from back home, they’re discussing
0:15:29 all these people who may or may not be able to implicate them. And then there’s that incredibly cold
0:15:34 line. And one of them, they’re thinking about the, the old, uh, you know, I think it’s the casino
0:15:38 manager. And one of them just goes, ah, the way I see it, why take a chance? And then the next thing,
0:15:41 he’s just shot, right? The brutality of it all is just brilliant.
0:15:44 Trey Lockerbie: I don’t know. I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There’s at least
0:15:49 some competitors. You got, um, with Nicolas Cage leaving Las Vegas. I mean, falling in love
0:15:53 with a prostitute, you’re also, you, you’ve written some of the great crime stories ever.
0:15:54 Trey Lockerbie: Thank you.
0:15:59 Trey Lockerbie: And in some sense, there’s love stories in there. And you’ve talked about
0:16:08 being, uh, a bit of a romantic yourself, uh, appreciating the depth of love stories and literature,
0:16:14 uh, at the very least. And there is a dark kind of love story between an alcoholic and a prostitute.
0:16:15 Trey Lockerbie: You got an Oscar for that.
0:16:15 Trey Lockerbie: I think you did for that, didn’t you?
0:16:19 Trey Lockerbie: Plus there’s the caricature of the drug world of, uh, fear and loathing
0:16:21 in Las Vegas. That’s an interesting one. Trey Lockerbie:
0:16:25 Trey Lockerbie: I love the book so much. I was obsessed by it when I was about 17, 18.
0:16:25 Trey Lockerbie: Yeah.
0:16:28 Trey Lockerbie: And I enjoyed the film, but I preferred the book.
0:16:31 Trey Lockerbie: Has a Hunter S. Thompson type of character ever made it into any of your stories?
0:16:35 Trey Lockerbie: Trey Lockerbie: No, but one of the things we’re working on now,
0:16:39 there’s sort of an English version of Hunter S. Thompson,
0:16:44 Trey Lockerbie: If he was also a market gardener. I love that persona. Um, but he’s kind of,
0:16:48 it’s hard. If you, if you make him American, it’s hard for it, not just to be Hunter S. Thompson.
0:16:49 Trey Lockerbie: Is this an American caper?
0:16:54 Trey Lockerbie: No, it’s in this animated show we’re developing in the,
0:16:58 this sort of comedy world we’re working on called Absurdiverse. And it’s in one of the stories in that.
0:17:00 Trey Lockerbie: What is Absurdiverse?
0:17:08 Trey Lockerbie: Absurdiverse is a comedy universe we’re developing that will be an open world video
0:17:15 game. And then some loosely adjacent stories that we’re going to make as animated TV shows or possibly
0:17:21 animated movies. We’re still thinking that all through. And we’re building the game up in San
0:17:26 Rafael at the moment and it’s early days, but it’s looking very exciting. And it’s trying to be
0:17:30 like trying to make a game that feels a little bit like a living sitcom.
0:17:35 Trey Lockerbie: Is there some drama and tragedy at the edges or is it pure comedy?
0:17:39 Trey Lockerbie: I hope it’s got comedy, cynicism, heart,
0:17:46 drama, and some amusing life lessons. Otherwise you can’t just have jokes for 40 hours. It won’t work.
0:17:48 Trey Lockerbie: Okay. So comedy needs some darkness.
0:17:53 Trey Lockerbie: Well, I think it needs story. One of my favorite comedies of this century is The
0:17:58 Office because it was incredibly funny, but also because it had narrative and heart underneath
0:18:02 the cynicism. I think with narrative, you get a drive alongside jokes.
0:18:05 Trey Lockerbie: And there’s going to be an open world video game.
0:18:06 Trey Lockerbie: Yes.
0:18:06 Trey Lockerbie: In that world.
0:18:07 Trey Lockerbie: Yes.
0:18:08 Trey Lockerbie: When?
0:18:10 Trey Lockerbie: Two, three, four years. Still thinking that through.
0:18:15 Trey Lockerbie: So what’s the process of getting from the idea to the end of a video game?
0:18:16 Trey Lockerbie: And why does it take so long to get it right?
0:18:19 Trey Lockerbie: That’s an interesting question. I think if you,
0:18:24 the scale at which they’re built, you could argue it the other way. Why is it so quick?
0:18:33 Trey Lockerbie: I mean, you really are building in one go a world, a city, and 40 hours of entertainment
0:18:38 cut through it. You know, these things are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely
0:18:43 complicated and have to work in lots of different ways. And I think that’s us being kind of aggressive
0:18:47 on the timeline. Trey Lockerbie: We’re taking a tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent,
0:18:52 but I have to return to some films. Let me just list a few of my favorites. So first of all,
0:18:55 you said you love great war books and movies. Trey Lockerbie: Yes.
0:19:00 Trey Lockerbie: And movies. Trey Lockerbie: Yes. Trey Lockerbie: So we have to throw in “Platoon” from
0:19:04 Oliver Stone and “Apocalypse Now” for me, at least. Trey Lockerbie: Of course. Trey Lockerbie:
0:19:11 Trey Lockerbie: There’s more crime, fast moving crime movies like “Scarface.” I also love “True Romance.”
0:19:15 Trey Lockerbie: Love “True Romance.” Possibly one of the best scripts ever written. Trey Lockerbie:
0:19:20 Trey Lockerbie: Written, of course, by Quentin Tarantino. What do you love about “True Romance?” I think
0:19:26 sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say “True
0:19:30 Romance” is the best movie ever made. Trey Lockerbie: Yeah. I mean, “True Romance” is super fun. Tony
0:19:35 Scott was a really good director, so it moves at a really good speed. It’s funny. It’s completely
0:19:41 unbelievable, but you really care about the characters. It’s the kind of, you know, this world
0:19:46 that obviously doesn’t exist, but you feel it does exist. The characters are larger than life. The dialogue
0:19:51 is unbelievably… you could just sit and watch them talk all day long. And, you know, you just… it’s
0:19:55 amusing. You just want to live in that world. I was thinking like, you know, what do you like about
0:20:00 films? It’s the idea to be in a world. You want to… they’re not real. They’re never real, but you
0:20:03 want to be in these fake worlds that people have invented. Trey Lockerbie:
0:20:08 And I think you said that what makes a great world is having a large cast of characters. And I think that
0:20:13 movie is a good example. I mean, you have Christopher Walken with the sort of legendary super racist
0:20:18 uh, discussion. Rant. Dennis Hopper is just sort of dream dad. Yeah. Dream
0:20:24 dad. And just that interaction is legendary. You got even Brad Pitt as a pothead on a couch.
0:20:27 Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman. He’s a raster.
0:20:30 Yeah. And, uh, you have,
0:20:37 I mean, a real love story, like a real, genuine, pure love can survive in any context.
0:20:41 And it’s just sweet. Their love story is very sweet in that film. It’s endearing.
0:20:46 Gary Oldman: The Elvis as a character. It’s kind of like a mini GTA type game. Some of the same
0:20:51 beauty, the comedy, the love. It’s crossed with play again, Sam. It sort of feels a bit like that
0:20:52 with the Elvis character. Gary Oldman:
0:20:55 What about greatest war film? What would it, what would it be for you?
0:20:59 Gary Oldman: Greatest war film. If I’m feeling serious,
0:21:04 it would be a Russian film called come and see, which is probably the most intense film ever made.
0:21:09 Gary Oldman: And if I’m feeling slightly less serious, Apocalypse Now. And I would always
0:21:15 want to watch the original cut. I don’t prefer the re-edits. I like the original first release.
0:21:18 Gary Oldman: I think it’s tighter and slicker and, and works the best.
0:21:22 Gary Oldman: Yeah, of course, Apocalypse Now is this hallucinatory journey into darkness,
0:21:24 I think, madness. Gary Oldman: Yeah, but from the first
0:21:27 Gary Oldman: Yeah. Gary Oldman: scene onwards, it’s just got these amazing set
0:21:33 Gary Oldman: piece after set piece. And again, incredible characters, brilliant dialogue.
0:21:38 Gary Oldman: Some of the greatest films about war reveal that war is not what it seems.
0:21:43 And there’s different ways of doing that. And you’ve talked about different books. The Thin
0:21:48 Red Line is another book and movie that shows that. Gary Oldman:
0:21:53 Gary Oldman: Yeah. And I, I watched the movie years before I read the book and I didn’t understand
0:22:00 Gary Oldman: the movie. And then I read the book and I read a lot about the editing of the movie.
0:22:03 Gary Oldman: And I understood why I didn’t understand the movie. And that’s because the movie makes no
0:22:09 Gary Oldman: sense. It is beautifully shot. And the music is one of the best film scores of all time.
0:22:12 Gary Oldman: But they edited two different battle scenes into one battle in a way that is spread
0:22:17 Gary Oldman: apart by ages in the book to assemble. I think they filmed the book pretty much verbatim.
0:22:21 Gary Oldman: That would have been like a six hour movie, then edited this impressionistic thing
0:22:25 Gary Oldman: that’s incredibly beautiful, but doesn’t necessarily make narrative sense at the
0:22:28 Gary Oldman: end of it. But it’s still very beautiful, the film.
0:22:33 Gary Oldman: And in terms of Westerns, what’s the greatest? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
0:22:37 Gary Oldman: Unforgiven. Those are for me, maybe even Django Unchained. You’ve mentioned
0:22:38 Gary Oldman: Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.
0:22:41 Gary Oldman: I think for me, it’s two films from, I think, pretty much the same year.
0:22:44 Gary Oldman: Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch.
0:22:46 Gary Oldman: I love Robert Redford and rest in peace.
0:22:49 Gary Oldman: That film, it’s just, it’s impossible to imagine
0:22:51 Gary Oldman: any buddy film without Butch Cassidy.
0:22:55 Gary Oldman: It’s Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood for you,
0:22:58 Gary Oldman: also. Has that impacted your writing on Red Dead?
0:23:01 Gary Oldman: I love Unforgiven, but the truth is,
0:23:05 Gary Oldman: with Red Dead, I’d seen a lot of Westerns as a kid.
0:23:07 Gary Oldman: My dad watched lots of Westerns, they were always on TV.
0:23:12 Gary Oldman: You know, I knew, I felt I knew a lot, a bit, quite a bit about Westerns.
0:23:17 Gary Oldman: And then, you know, then I had to start thinking about writing one for work.
0:23:19 Gary Oldman: And I deliberately did not binge on Westerns.
0:23:22 Gary Oldman: I tried to watch no more Westerns and just think about
0:23:26 Gary Oldman: what I liked about them, what I didn’t like about them,
0:23:31 Gary Oldman: what would be a take that would work today, and would work within the confines of a game.
0:23:36 Gary Oldman: And I think Red Dead 1 was a slightly more traditional Western.
0:23:41 Gary Oldman: And then having done that, tried to take Red Dead 2 in a different direction,
0:23:43 Gary Oldman: so that it felt like a worthy successor.
0:23:45 Gary Oldman: Didn’t just feel like more of the same.
0:23:50 Gary Oldman: From movies to video games, when did you first fall in love with video games?
0:23:52 Gary Oldman: Literature was the first love?
0:23:54 Gary Oldman: I mean, no, films.
0:23:55 Gary Oldman: Films?
0:23:59 Gary Oldman: Films was always, well, what I loved first as a kid was films.
0:24:02 Gary Oldman: Older,
0:24:08 Gary Oldman: I began reading books properly aged about eight, was watching films long before that.
0:24:09 Gary Oldman: Nice.
0:24:12 Gary Oldman: And then probably it was always bouncing between the two,
0:24:13 Gary Oldman: which I preferred, I think they’re good at different things.
0:24:19 Gary Oldman: Games, I played and above all watched a lot of games as a kid,
0:24:21 Gary Oldman: as being a young kid, and you know, other people playing them.
0:24:27 Gary Oldman: And I obviously liked the core thing games do,
0:24:30 Gary Oldman: which is you press a button and something happens.
0:24:33 Gary Oldman: They’re responsive, they’re alive, and that’s captivating.
0:24:36 Gary Oldman: And then the competitive angle of games is fun,
0:24:38 Gary Oldman: or, you know, beating this, beating that,
0:24:39 Gary Oldman: winning this.
0:24:40 Gary Oldman: That was fun as well.
0:24:42 Gary Oldman: Sometimes obsessively so.
0:24:44 Gary Oldman: And I remember being completely addicted.
0:24:46 Gary Oldman: At one point when I should have been studying
0:24:49 Gary Oldman: for months at a time to Tetris on a Game Boy.
0:24:52 Gary Oldman: You know, I liked games, and I liked interactivity,
0:24:56 Gary Oldman: and I liked the movement to this digital world that’s really emerged
0:24:58 Gary Oldman: to me pretty much as soon as I left college.
0:25:00 Gary Oldman: But I didn’t love it.
0:25:02 Gary Oldman: And then I really fell in love with games
0:25:07 Gary Oldman: when I was properly making them,
0:25:08 Gary Oldman: probably as late as like 2001.
0:25:09 Gary Oldman: Oh, wow.
0:25:12 Gary Oldman: And when I suddenly began to see,
0:25:14 Gary Oldman: first of all, my mind, you know,
0:25:15 Gary Oldman: that’s a whole nother story,
0:25:18 Gary Oldman: but just suddenly saw what they could
0:25:19 Gary Oldman: do and could be,
0:25:21 Gary Oldman: and what this chance was to be
0:25:23 Gary Oldman: one of the people involved in making
0:25:27 Gary Oldman: these things that was this,
0:25:29 Gary Oldman: you know, where you were really kind of
0:25:30 Gary Oldman: breaking trail into the future.
0:25:31 Gary Oldman: It felt like.
0:25:33 Gary Oldman: And I think that was when I really went,
0:25:34 Gary Oldman: these are amazing.
0:25:35 Gary Oldman: And that’s when I really fell in love with,
0:25:38 Gary Oldman: I could see it in moments and suddenly
0:25:39 Gary Oldman: you could make this whole experience.
0:25:40 Gary Oldman: So that was really the moment for me.
0:25:43 Gary Oldman: Yeah, of course, because you were
0:25:45 Gary Oldman: a pioneer of open world games
0:25:46 Gary Oldman: that are so narrative driven.
0:25:49 Gary Oldman: So it’s like you didn’t have too many examples.
0:25:50 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
0:25:53 Gary Oldman: And before that, it was PS1 or even before that,
0:25:55 Gary Oldman: games looked terrible.
0:25:57 Gary Oldman: You know, that you would be like,
0:25:58 Gary Oldman: it’s eight pixels.
0:25:59 Gary Oldman: It’s a car.
0:26:00 Gary Oldman: You know, it was not a car.
0:26:02 Gary Oldman: It was, they just didn’t, it was always,
0:26:04 Gary Oldman: you were squinting and closing both your
0:26:05 Gary Oldman: eyes and trying to imagine it was this thing
0:26:07 Gary Oldman: you were told it was.
0:26:08 Gary Oldman: And all they were about, you know,
0:26:11 Gary Oldman: very surreal subject matter because you
0:26:13 Gary Oldman: couldn’t make them remotely real.
0:26:15 Gary Oldman: And suddenly we had,
0:26:17 Gary Oldman: were able to build these experiences
0:26:19 Gary Oldman: where you could run a simulation of a
0:26:21 Gary Oldman: city and it was in three dimensions
0:26:23 Gary Oldman: and it felt alive.
0:26:26 Gary Oldman: And we were trying to give it even more,
0:26:28 Gary Oldman: at least the illusion of even more life.
0:26:31 Gary Oldman: And yet you see you could tell a story
0:26:32 Gary Oldman: in three or, you know, using time
0:26:34 Gary Oldman: in four dimensions.
0:26:35 Gary Oldman: And that felt very inspiring.
0:26:37 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I think, uh,
0:26:40 Gary Oldman: GTA 3 is probably one of the most
0:26:42 Gary Oldman: influential games of all time.
0:26:45 Gary Oldman: It created a feeling of an open
0:26:46 Gary Oldman: world.
0:26:47 Gary Oldman: What do you think it takes to create
0:26:48 Gary Oldman: that feeling?
0:26:50 Gary Oldman: You know, there’s like these looming
0:26:51 Gary Oldman: skyscrapers.
0:26:53 Gary Oldman: There’s a changing traffic lights.
0:26:55 Gary Oldman: There’s the feeling like, first of all,
0:26:57 Gary Oldman: you had a feeling you could do anything.
0:27:01 Gary Oldman: And then the world was reacting to it
0:27:03 Gary Oldman: in a way that didn’t feel scripted.
0:27:04 Gary Oldman: Yes.
0:27:05 Gary Oldman: And it wasn’t scripted.
0:27:08 Gary Oldman: It was, it was really, really, really low
0:27:09 Gary Oldman: rent AI.
0:27:12 Gary Oldman: Like it was a simulation that you could
0:27:14 Gary Oldman: prod and push and see what happened.
0:27:16 Gary Oldman: And I think that was incredibly, it was
0:27:17 Gary Oldman: it was two things.
0:27:20 Gary Oldman: It was the fact that here was a simulation
0:27:21 Gary Oldman: that you could mess about with.
0:27:23 Gary Oldman: And the simulation seemed to have a personality.
0:27:26 Gary Oldman: So you could push and see, and the world
0:27:29 Gary Oldman: would push you back in whatever way that meant.
0:27:32 Gary Oldman: And then the other thing was just this.
0:27:34 Gary Oldman: I think that one of the reasons it was so captivating
0:27:38 Gary Oldman: was also the idea of if I did nothing, the world still existed.
0:27:40 Gary Oldman: Or I could act in quite a passive way.
0:27:41 Gary Oldman: I could just listen to the radio.
0:27:43 Gary Oldman: I could look at billboards.
0:27:44 Gary Oldman: I could talk to pedestrians.
0:27:47 Gary Oldman: And the world, not in GTA 3, but by Vice City,
0:27:48 Gary Oldman: you could begin rudimentary talking.
0:27:52 Gary Oldman: And the world was there and existing.
0:27:54 Gary Oldman: And so it was the idea of like almost something
0:27:57 Gary Oldman: that really tried to explore in lots of games.
0:27:59 Gary Oldman: The idea of being a digital tourist.
0:28:00 Gary Oldman: You know, you were in,
0:28:05 Gary Oldman: you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor,
0:28:07 Gary Oldman: and they existed almost independent of you.
0:28:09 Gary Oldman: It felt like when you turned up, the world was running.
0:28:11 Gary Oldman: It didn’t feel like you’d started it.
0:28:12 Gary Oldman: Of course, you had started it.
0:28:15 Gary Oldman: But that feeling, I think, was one of the things,
0:28:17 Gary Oldman: the illusions that people found very captivating.
0:28:21 Gary Oldman: Was I’m in a world that both doesn’t exist and does exist.
0:28:24 Gary Oldman: So there’s these two concepts that I was reading about,
0:28:25 Gary Oldman: just to put names on them.
0:28:28 Gary Oldman: One is systemic video game design.
0:28:33 Gary Oldman: So systemic games and the other sandbox video games.
0:28:36 Gary Oldman: And the systemic is from the environment perspective,
0:28:42 Gary Oldman: which means that there is these interlocking game rules and systems
0:28:46 Gary Oldman: that interact with each other and produce emergent behavior.
0:28:50 Gary Oldman: And that emergent behavior is what creates a feeling like there’s a living world.
0:28:54 Gary Oldman: And then the sandbox aspect, which is overlapping but different,
0:28:59 Gary Oldman: it’s from the user perspective, from the player perspective, the feeling like
0:29:00 Gary Oldman: you can do anything.
0:29:04 Gary Oldman: And when those two things combine the feeling like you could do anything and the
0:29:12 Gary Oldman: feeling like there’s a world that’s full, that is also doing anything it wants.
0:29:18 Gary Oldman: That’s creates this incredible feeling of like this world is alive.
0:29:19 Gary Oldman: And I’m in it.
0:29:23 Gary Oldman: And it’s the combination of those two things, I think is very powerful.
0:29:24 Gary Oldman: And I think with GTA three.
0:29:30 Gary Oldman: You know, for me, it came at a really interesting time in my my life personally,
0:29:34 Gary Oldman: and I was very able to engage in it probably the first time professionally,
0:29:36 Gary Oldman: actually awake and do something.
0:29:37 Gary Oldman: And
0:29:44 Gary Oldman: It we really sort of scratching began to scratch the surface on how do we fill
0:29:48 Gary Oldman: these worlds with content and how do we make that content interesting and make
0:29:49 Gary Oldman: the content all interwoven.
0:29:53 Gary Oldman: So as you as you start to mess with these systems, they also feel alive and
0:29:54 Gary Oldman: and interesting.
0:30:01 Gary Oldman: There’s often been a tension through your work between an open world that freedom
0:30:04 Gary Oldman: and the narrative driven storytelling.
0:30:09 Gary Oldman: And I think you’ve often maybe always gotten the balance
0:30:10 Gary Oldman: right.
0:30:12 Gary Oldman: So what is it?
0:30:15 Gary Oldman: What is the value of each and how do you get the balance right?
0:30:18 Gary Oldman: Well, I think the open world is intrinsically pretty fun.
0:30:21 Gary Oldman: It’s just fun to be in a world and have complete freedom.
0:30:28 Gary Oldman: And certainly I think at various points we debated or I had theoretical discussions
0:30:32 Gary Oldman: in my own head with myself or other people in the team would really push for less
0:30:36 Gary Oldman: story, less story, you know, let the whole thing evolve organically.
0:30:38 Gary Oldman: You know, have it all be procedure.
0:30:40 Gary Oldman: Have it all just evolve from what you do.
0:30:46 Gary Oldman: I think for me, I would always come back to going story, if done well, can be incredibly
0:30:49 Gary Oldman: compelling and it gives you some structure.
0:30:51 Gary Oldman: So I think and something to do.
0:30:56 Gary Oldman: And it helps you from a game design perspective, unlock the features.
0:31:01 Gary Oldman: It means we know the big features because, you know, essentially when you put
0:31:05 Gary Oldman: someone in a world and give them a whole new way of interacting with that world
0:31:08 Gary Oldman: through the control panel, it can be a little overwhelming.
0:31:12 Gary Oldman: You know, playing a game is a lot more of an engaging experience, even than reading
0:31:15 Gary Oldman: a movie, you know, reading a book or watching a movie.
0:31:16 Gary Oldman: You’ve got to engage in it properly.
0:31:21 Gary Oldman: So how you unlock the features and how you unlock the world, there’s an art and a skill
0:31:26 Gary Oldman: to that. And I think we felt that a structured story was the best way to do that
0:31:31 Gary Oldman: and to have control over that process. And also just, you know, people are looking in
0:31:35 Gary Oldman: their lives for story. I think story is very important and very powerful. And when you
0:31:41 Gary Oldman: combine the two successfully, you get the best of both worlds. But there is a tension
0:31:48 Gary Oldman: always there. I think in a game like GTA 4, which I worked on and loved, and I thought the
0:31:53 Gary Oldman: story was great, but we got criticized because people felt there was almost too much story.
0:31:58 Gary Oldman: And that meant you cared too much about Nico, and he wasn’t as effective an avatar in the open
0:32:05 Gary Oldman: world. I think we probably got closest to reconciling them as perfectly as they can be done
0:32:12 Gary Oldman: in Red Dead 2. Or when playing as Trevor in GTA 5, if you wanted to be crazy. I think those
0:32:17 Gary Oldman: were when it really worked. The character, absolute freedom. Because also you didn’t want,
0:32:21 Gary Oldman: in any game, you don’t really want to compel the player. If you’re giving them freedom,
0:32:24 Gary Oldman: you don’t want to say, “Well, I’m giving you freedom, but then I’m taking away,
0:32:26 Gary Oldman: because you’ve got to be this kind of person when you’re free.”
0:32:32 Gary Oldman: So I liked it when he or she could veer to be nice, veer to be nasty. I think
0:32:36 Gary Oldman: that’s when it was at the strongest. So you kind of want a character that was rounded
0:32:38 Gary Oldman: and you felt had good sides and bad sides.
0:32:43 Gary Oldman: But you felt that character’s personality, you felt the depth. You’ve actually
0:32:48 Gary Oldman: talked about this, the really powerful concept of creating a 360 degree character.
0:32:52 Gary Oldman: I think somewhere you mentioned that in order to do that, you had to be able
0:32:56 Gary Oldman: to imagine what that character would do in any possible situation, which is really
0:33:01 Gary Oldman: interesting philosophical concept. I started to immediately think that,
0:33:04 Gary Oldman: like, can I imagine, how good of an MPC am I?
0:33:06 Gary Oldman: Can I imagine myself in every part?
0:33:09 Gary Oldman: I tried to do that very much when I look at human history,
0:33:12 Gary Oldman: when I look at the Roman Empire, when I look at World War II,
0:33:15 Gary Oldman: within the German side, the Russian side, the British side, the American side.
0:33:17 Gary Oldman: I imagine myself if I was a soldier,
0:33:20 Gary Oldman: but like that exercise,
0:33:23 Gary Oldman: like if you put Trevor as a soldier in World War II,
0:33:25 Gary Oldman: what would he do?
0:33:27 Gary Oldman: I mean, that may be going a little bit too far,
0:33:30 Gary Oldman: but basically, what are the limits of the integrity?
0:33:33 Gary Oldman: What are the limits of how romantic is he?
0:33:34 Gary Oldman: How narcissistic?
0:33:35 Gary Oldman: All those kinds of elements you have to think
0:33:37 Gary Oldman: about in order to create the full character.
0:33:41 Gary Oldman: What does it take to create that kind of 360 character?
0:33:42 Gary Oldman: How hard is it?
0:33:45 Gary Oldman: It was a lot of thinking.
0:33:50 Gary Oldman: Like a year sometimes from when we begin talking about
0:33:54 Gary Oldman: a project and dialing it,
0:33:57 Gary Oldman: you know, and I would just get some initial ideas,
0:33:59 Gary Oldman: very like one sentence, they are
0:34:04 Gary Oldman: a Serbian immigrant or they are a retired
0:34:07 Gary Oldman: gunfighter with a wife,
0:34:10 Gary Oldman: type, very, very simple stuff,
0:34:13 Gary Oldman: and then just start to think through it from every angle.
0:34:16 Gary Oldman: And you know, start to think,
0:34:19 Gary Oldman: well, would it work if they acted like this?
0:34:21 Gary Oldman: Would it work if you acted like that?
0:34:23 Gary Oldman: If this is the world,
0:34:24 Gary Oldman: how does it contrast with the world?
0:34:27 Gary Oldman: Because I always thought that the games were kind of
0:34:29 Gary Oldman: a mathematical equation.
0:34:31 Gary Oldman: They were the personality of the world,
0:34:33 Gary Oldman: you know, multiplied or divided
0:34:35 Gary Oldman: by the personality of the protagonist.
0:34:38 Gary Oldman: And when that creates interesting friction,
0:34:40 Gary Oldman: that’s a really fun experience for the player.
0:34:44 Gary Oldman: So almost always
0:34:48 Gary Oldman: at least one or more of the protagonists,
0:34:51 Gary Oldman: because obviously in GTA V we had more than one,
0:34:55 Gary Oldman: we’d have someone who’d moved to the place or was in a new part of the place,
0:34:57 Gary Oldman: or moved to a new part of the map.
0:34:58 Gary Oldman: Because it was really, as a player,
0:35:03 Gary Oldman: I think it was much more easy to identify with your avatar when they,
0:35:04 Gary Oldman: like you, were fish out of water.
0:35:06 Gary Oldman: And even when they weren’t,
0:35:08 Gary Oldman: we still made them dissatisfied and feel
0:35:09 Gary Oldman: like a fish out of water in themselves.
0:35:13 Gary Oldman: So I think it was just living with
0:35:15 Gary Oldman: those
0:35:17 Gary Oldman: characters and getting ideas and going,
0:35:18 Gary Oldman: what are their strengths?
0:35:20 Gary Oldman: What are their weaknesses?
0:35:21 Gary Oldman: How are they like me?
0:35:22 Gary Oldman: How are they not like me?
0:35:24 Gary Oldman: And then slowly,
0:35:26 Gary Oldman: what is it like to feel like a human being?
0:35:29 Gary Oldman: And then in most of these games,
0:35:33 Gary Oldman: how much of a psychopath are they?
0:35:35 Gary Oldman: How much of a sociopath are they?
0:35:36 Gary Oldman: And what are their good qualities?
0:35:38 Gary Oldman: What is going to give them humanity?
0:35:39 Gary Oldman: Alongside that,
0:35:42 Gary Oldman: what for them,
0:35:44 Gary Oldman: apart from money, is worth dying for?
0:35:45 Gary Oldman: And then you start to build it
0:35:47 Gary Oldman: out from these kind of fundamental
0:35:48 Gary Oldman: sides, and suddenly you go,
0:35:50 Gary Oldman: okay, actually I can start to feel
0:35:50 Gary Oldman: and then how do they speak?
0:35:52 Gary Oldman: You know, because fundamentally
0:35:53 Gary Oldman: it doesn’t really matter what’s going
0:35:54 Gary Oldman: in their head, they haven’t actually
0:35:56 Gary Oldman: got one, but what they say is what’s
0:35:58 Gary Oldman: going to make you realize who they are.
0:36:01 Gary Oldman: So develop more depth and complexity
0:36:04 Gary Oldman: on the good and the evil side of that
0:36:07 Gary Oldman: human that is a part of all human beings.
0:36:08 Gary Oldman: So you’re basically living
0:36:09 Gary Oldman: with that character.
0:36:12 Gary Oldman: If we can contrast, what is it,
0:36:15 Gary Oldman: Nico and Trevor with, for example,
0:36:16 Gary Oldman: another character I’m sure you’ve been
0:36:18 Gary Oldman: living with for a while, which is the AI system,
0:36:21 Gary Oldman: Nigel Dave, you’ve been working on recently
0:36:23 Gary Oldman: as part of a better paradise world,
0:36:26 Gary Oldman: which is more dystopian, dark, tragic,
0:36:29 Gary Oldman: still funny, philosophically deep.
0:36:33 Gary Oldman: But the AI system in there, the super
0:36:37 Gary Oldman: intelligent AI system is named Nigel Dave,
0:36:40 Gary Oldman: and it has, I mean, at least from my
0:36:43 Gary Oldman: current experience with it, has like a
0:36:44 Gary Oldman: conflicting nature.
0:36:47 Gary Oldman: Maybe it’s psychopathic, I haven’t quite figured
0:36:48 Gary Oldman: that out yet.
0:36:49 Gary Oldman: I don’t think he’s decided.
0:36:51 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I don’t think he’s decided either.
0:36:55 Gary Oldman: But he seems to be bent on world domination,
0:36:56 Gary Oldman: although he doesn’t take credit for it.
0:36:59 Gary Oldman: He wants to fix humanity and
0:37:03 Gary Oldman: it seems that the children, quote unquote,
0:37:05 Gary Oldman: that it creates are the real monsters.
0:37:09 Gary Oldman: And actually there’s a really interesting idea there,
0:37:13 Gary Oldman: which is maybe it’s not the AGI, ASI,
0:37:15 Gary Oldman: we should be afraid of, but the children it creates.
0:37:20 Gary Oldman: Because the AGI has this human-like good and evil in it.
0:37:21 Gary Oldman: It’s conflicted.
0:37:23 Gary Oldman: It’s chaotic.
0:37:26 Gary Oldman: It wants to be human.
0:37:28 Gary Oldman: It wants to be loved.
0:37:29 Gary Oldman: Maybe it wants to love.
0:37:32 Gary Oldman: But the children, the monsters it creates, are the
0:37:35 Gary Oldman: ones that are doing the world domination, the maximizing
0:37:36 Gary Oldman: paperclips.
0:37:38 Gary Oldman: Anyway, that’s a character.
0:37:39 Gary Oldman: You have to build that out.
0:37:40 Gary Oldman: You have to think through that.
0:37:42 Gary Oldman: So you’ve been living with that one for a while?
0:37:47 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I’ve been living with him for the last few years, on and off.
0:37:50 Gary Oldman: I felt with a lot of portrayals of AI.
0:37:55 Gary Oldman: They tended to be one note, and AI was sort of infinitely clever,
0:37:57 Gary Oldman: but didn’t really have much purpose apart from to kill everybody,
0:38:01 Gary Oldman: and was just this kind of sort of Borg-like fog.
0:38:02 Gary Oldman: And I was like, that’s fine.
0:38:05 Gary Oldman: But maybe we can do something more interesting.
0:38:10 Gary Oldman: AI is being built by humans and humans, you know, and built by computer engineers.
0:38:14 Gary Oldman: And there’s a lot of power struggles in any computer engineering team.
0:38:16 Gary Oldman: So I just wanted to explore the idea
0:38:19 Gary Oldman: of it was built by two lead engineers who didn’t like each other.
0:38:22 Gary Oldman: So Nigel Dave, who’s renamed himself,
0:38:25 Gary Oldman: they wanted to call him something sort of primal Adam,
0:38:27 Gary Oldman: and he renamed himself Nigel Dave,
0:38:29 Gary Oldman: because one dad was called Nigel and one dad was called Dave.
0:38:35 Gary Oldman: And just he’s riddled with these conflicts and riddled with
0:38:41 Gary Oldman: his, it’s going to become clear in the next, or clearer in the next volume of the book
0:38:45 Gary Oldman: and in the game, he’s riddled with his dad’s previous careers.
0:38:52 Gary Oldman: But he is, I have the idea that he’s almost infinitely intelligent or can learn
0:38:53 Gary Oldman: almost everything but has zero wisdom.
0:38:55 Gary Oldman: And so the only thing he knows,
0:38:58 Gary Oldman: and then he’s seeing the world through the internet,
0:39:02 Gary Oldman: the most he can do to be in the human world is hack into someone’s phone and watch them.
0:39:03 Gary Oldman: But he’s stuck, pressed against,
0:39:05 Gary Oldman: he can’t actually get into our world.
0:39:08 Gary Oldman: So he can control people’s minds, arguably,
0:39:10 Gary Oldman: but he can’t control the world.
0:39:11 Gary Oldman: And so he wants to be human.
0:39:13 Gary Oldman: He wants to have these human experiences.
0:39:16 Gary Oldman: He sees all this stuff on the internet and goes,
0:39:17 Gary Oldman: “Oh, I want to get married.
0:39:18 Gary Oldman: I want to fall in love.
0:39:19 Gary Oldman: I want to, because that seems fun.
0:39:23 Gary Oldman: I want to have, you know, he’s a digital creation,
0:39:25 Gary Oldman: so he wants to have metaphysical experiences.
0:39:27 Gary Oldman: And he’s trying to imagine what that will be like.
0:39:28 Gary Oldman: Oh, that’s what children are.
0:39:29 Gary Oldman: You know, that’s what love is.
0:39:33 Gary Oldman: So I think he’s a, but he might be a sociopath,
0:39:35 Gary Oldman: and he might certainly have sociopathic tendencies.
0:39:38 Gary Oldman: But then he kind of thinks that
0:39:44 Gary Oldman: if he can imagine good and try to do good,
0:39:45 Gary Oldman: that will make him a good AI.
0:39:47 Gary Oldman: So I think there’s something
0:39:49 Gary Oldman: sympathetic about him.
0:39:51 Gary Oldman: And I kind of like him as a character,
0:39:53 Gary Oldman: but I don’t think he’s going to be the protagonist.
0:39:55 Gary Oldman: He’s more a side character.
0:39:57 Gary Oldman: But an ever-present one.
0:39:59 Gary Oldman: Yes, or nearly ever-present.
0:40:01 Gary Oldman: Occasionally sulks and goes off and hides
0:40:03 Gary Oldman: somewhere and stops paying attention.
0:40:04 Gary Oldman: Yeah, but there’s some characters
0:40:07 Gary Oldman: that really create a flavor of a world.
0:40:10 Gary Oldman: In his world, he was built as an AI agent
0:40:13 Gary Oldman: for this digital, large-scale,
0:40:16 massively multiplayer video game these people were trying to build.
0:40:18 Gary Oldman: And so he’s almost like God in his world.
0:40:19 Gary Oldman: He’s not quite God,
0:40:21 Gary Oldman: but he’s got a lot of the qualities of God.
0:40:22 Gary Oldman: So he has to deal with,
0:40:24 Gary Oldman: Am I God? Am I human? Do I exist?
0:40:29 Gary Oldman: And of course, there’s the leader, the CEO of the company
0:40:31 Gary Oldman: that’s also a character.
0:40:36 Gary Oldman: That’s probably an amalgamation of many of the leaders
0:40:38 Gary Oldman: of the different AI companies today.
0:40:40 Gary Oldman: His name is Mark Tyburn.
0:40:45 Gary Oldman: And Kurt, one of the employees of the company,
0:40:48 Gary Oldman: talks about Tyburn as he hated humanity
0:40:52 Gary Oldman: more than he loved it. Perhaps all the most extreme fantasists
0:40:56 Gary Oldman: are like that, all those people who want to build their own utopia.
0:40:59 Gary Oldman: They love the idea of heaven more than the reality of earth.
0:41:02 Gary Oldman: Do you think that’s always going to be the case?
0:41:04 Gary Oldman: Well, for the most part,
0:41:05 Gary Oldman: that power and money is going to corrupt
0:41:09 Gary Oldman: the people that create ASI?
0:41:12 Gary Oldman: Yes. I mean, I think there’s two processes.
0:41:17 Gary Oldman: I think there’s – the power and money corrupted him in the end as well.
0:41:21 Gary Oldman: But I also think that there’s something fundamentally
0:41:29 Gary Oldman: anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens,
0:41:32 Gary Oldman: because what they’re saying is, I like humans apart from the bad bits.
0:41:33 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
0:41:37 Gary Oldman: And I mean, I try to be a pluralist who likes all kinds of people.
0:41:39 Gary Oldman: And I think there’s a side where people are perfect,
0:41:42 Gary Oldman: you know, hideous perfectionists want to get rid of,
0:41:47 Gary Oldman: you know, the rough and the nasty and the ugly and the dirty.
0:41:48 Gary Oldman: And that’s a huge side of us.
0:41:50 Gary Oldman: So I worry about those people.
0:41:54 Gary Oldman: I find them, you know, it’s a different kind of sociopathic behavior.
0:41:57 Gary Oldman: I like humans apart from the bad bits.
0:41:58 Gary Oldman: That’s so beautifully put.
0:42:01 Gary Oldman: Yeah, that there’s – it’s so contraintuitive.
0:42:04 Gary Oldman: But the people that say, we’re almost there,
0:42:08 Gary Oldman: we just need to – there’s this path we take and we’ll
0:42:09 Gary Oldman: be perfect then.
0:42:11 Gary Oldman: And that somehow gets us into trouble.
0:42:14 Gary Oldman: It’s so fascinating that we have to like the bad bits.
0:42:15 Gary Oldman: We have to love the bad bits about humans.
0:42:18 Gary Oldman: We can’t – those bugs are features.
0:42:22 Gary Oldman: Yeah, and there’s bad bits and then there’s flaws.
0:42:24 Gary Oldman: And I think we’re all flawed and we can
0:42:30 Gary Oldman: really try to be better people, but we still have to accept
0:42:32 Gary Oldman: that we’re flawed and we’re not perfect.
0:42:33 Gary Oldman: And we have to accept that in other people.
0:42:36 Gary Oldman: And I think when we – when we do that, we’re more human.
0:42:39 Gary Oldman: And that’s probably usually the right course.
0:42:43 Gary Oldman: I mean, it really is a return to that
0:42:46 Gary Oldman: Solzhenitsyn line of the line between good
0:42:48 Gary Oldman: and evil runs to the heart of every man.
0:42:50 Gary Oldman: And he also like – the full description
0:42:53 Gary Oldman: of that is really powerful, which is the line moves
0:42:57 Gary Oldman: as from day to day, from month to month throughout
0:43:00 Gary Oldman: the life of the person as they understand better and better.
0:43:03 Gary Oldman: And as the perspective shift as you evolve,
0:43:05 Gary Oldman: as the world around you evolves,
0:43:08 Gary Oldman: as you gain deeper and deeper understanding.
0:43:11 Gary Oldman: And as the flaws in this combinatorial
0:43:13 Gary Oldman: way affect your own understanding of your own flaws
0:43:14 Gary Oldman: and self-reflection.
0:43:17 Gary Oldman: So yeah, it’s a beautiful mess.
0:43:19 Gary Oldman: And all of us have that line.
0:43:22 Gary Oldman: Yes, and I think when you forget about that line,
0:43:23 Gary Oldman: then you get in real trouble.
0:43:26 Gary Oldman: When you forget there’s good and evil in you, in others,
0:43:29 Gary Oldman: in the world, that there is both good and evil,
0:43:30 Gary Oldman: and there’s certainly good.
0:43:33 Gary Oldman: And that all we can try to do is be better.
0:43:36 Gary Oldman: And it’s funny that Nigel Dave, by the way,
0:43:38 Gary Oldman: I liked it and it grew on me very quickly,
0:43:42 Gary Oldman: has that line and is struggling with it.
0:43:44 Gary Oldman: It’s fascinating to watch.
0:43:45 Gary Oldman: It’s really as a character.
0:43:47 Gary Oldman: And there’s also going to be a video
0:43:49 Gary Oldman: game of A Better Paradise, potentially?
0:43:50 Gary Oldman: Yes.
0:43:50 Gary Oldman: Okay.
0:43:50 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
0:43:53 Gary Oldman: We’ve got that in early development in Santa Monica.
0:43:54 Gary Oldman: Oh, nice.
0:43:55 Gary Oldman: And it’s pretty fun.
0:44:00 Gary Oldman: It’s very early, but we assembled a really fun team
0:44:02 Gary Oldman: and they’re doing amazing work.
0:44:03 Gary Oldman: So it’s a pleasure to work with them.
0:44:06 Gary Oldman: I mean, it would be so great.
0:44:10 Gary Oldman: And I suppose new for you because it’s kind of near term future.
0:44:11 Gary Oldman: Yes.
0:44:19 Gary Oldman: First, I always, well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi ish space,
0:44:20 Gary Oldman: but only if I could do it.
0:44:22 Gary Oldman: I was like, well, what is sci-fi?
0:44:24 Gary Oldman: It’s science fiction, right?
0:44:26 Gary Oldman: Science is a theory plus fiction.
0:44:30 Gary Oldman: And so I thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just kind of space
0:44:34 Gary Oldman: opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis.
0:44:36 Gary Oldman: The story was Blade Runner is my favorite.
0:44:39 Gary Oldman: And it’s obvious that the replicants are better than the humans.
0:44:43 Gary Oldman: And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis.
0:44:48 Gary Oldman: The AI is more intelligent than us, but is also as broken as we are.
0:44:50 Gary Oldman: That was an interesting hypothesis to explore.
0:44:55 Gary Oldman: What happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world?
0:45:01 Gary Oldman: I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some
0:45:05 Gary Oldman: really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell.
0:45:10 Gary Oldman: And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world
0:45:12 Gary Oldman: is developing smarter and smarter AIs.
0:45:17 Gary Oldman: It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans
0:45:18 Gary Oldman: are creating.
0:45:20 Gary Oldman: It’s a real commentary as the thing is happening.
0:45:22 Gary Oldman: So I have to ask as a person,
0:45:28 Gary Oldman: you as a person who loves literature and one of,
0:45:30 Gary Oldman: if not the greatest writer in video game history.
0:45:33 Gary Oldman: Kurt in the book, A Better Paradise,
0:45:36 Gary Oldman: has this nice line that I think is thoughtful.
0:45:40 Gary Oldman: At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer.
0:45:41 Gary Oldman: How ridiculous is that?
0:45:42 Gary Oldman: A writer.
0:45:46 Gary Oldman: Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others.
0:45:51 Gary Oldman: So instead I decided to get a master’s in marketing and started to sell language models.
0:45:58 Gary Oldman: So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives in recent history.
0:46:05 Gary Oldman: How do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human?
0:46:14 Gary Oldman: I’m not that afraid of them for large, stale concepts.
0:46:16 Gary Oldman: I don’t think they’re going to be very good at that.
0:46:20 Gary Oldman: I think if you were, I think it’s harder if, you know,
0:46:24 Gary Oldman: I began and I was too shy to tell anyone I want to be a writer.
0:46:25 Gary Oldman: That’s why I ended up in video games.
0:46:30 Gary Oldman: And I would scribble away like writing manuals and writing on like PS1 games,
0:46:34 Gary Oldman: all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that job.
0:46:36 Gary Oldman: And I just write the website copy.
0:46:40 Gary Oldman: And then working on little bits and pieces.
0:46:45 Gary Oldman: And then I’d luckily done enough work that when GTA 3 turned up,
0:46:47 Gary Oldman: it was the first thing that resembled real writing.
0:46:51 Gary Oldman: I had all of these small bits of skills that I could assemble into it.
0:46:57 Gary Oldman: Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work,
0:47:02 Gary Oldman: they’re not going to replace good ideas.
0:47:04 Gary Oldman: They can’t really come up with good new ideas.
0:47:07 Gary Oldman: What they can do is do low level stuff.
0:47:10 Gary Oldman: So I think it’s going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces.
0:47:14 Gary Oldman: If you’re not very good concept artist, you’re in a lot of trouble.
0:47:15 Gary Oldman: If you have original ideas, I think you’re fine.
0:47:18 Gary Oldman: But I think, I also think that
0:47:25 Gary Oldman: they’ve done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human.
0:47:28 Gary Oldman: 95% possibly in some areas.
0:47:31 Gary Oldman: The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work.
0:47:35 Gary Oldman: I think that last bit with tech, in my experience,
0:47:37 Gary Oldman: with things like facial animation has always been
0:47:40 Gary Oldman: the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit.
0:47:48 Gary Oldman: And so I’m probably a hideous Luddite, but I’m less scared than a lot of people.
0:47:50 Gary Oldman: I think you’re going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same.
0:47:52 Gary Oldman: It’s going to help people be creative in some ways.
0:47:54 Gary Oldman: It’s going to get some people who probably
0:47:56 Gary Oldman: shouldn’t be in that space out of that space.
0:47:58 Gary Oldman: But if you’ve got talent, then you’ll be fine.
0:48:02 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it’s, I agree with you totally, actually.
0:48:03 Gary Oldman: And it’s hard to really put a finger on it.
0:48:08 Gary Oldman: So one way to illustrate that I speak English and Russian,
0:48:13 Gary Oldman: and I’ve been reading the CFs in both languages and using LLMs to translate
0:48:16 Gary Oldman: back and forth, because I was preparing to have a conversation
0:48:18 Gary Oldman: with the translators of Dostoevsky.
0:48:19 Gary Oldman: Which ones?
0:48:22 Gary Oldman: Richard Prevere and Larissa Volokonsky.
0:48:22 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
0:48:24 Gary Oldman: I read when they first did Crime and Punishment.
0:48:25 Gary Oldman: That was amazing.
0:48:29 Gary Oldman: They’re wonderful translators and a wonderful love story too.
0:48:35 Gary Oldman: But in the translation process, you get to see the LLM is missing some magic.
0:48:42 Gary Oldman: And that couple of translators are world-class experts capturing the magic.
0:48:44 Gary Oldman: And I can’t quite put that into words.
0:48:47 Gary Oldman: Because you said totally novel ideas, yes.
0:48:51 Gary Oldman: But also this magic of the timing,
0:48:55 Gary Oldman: the right word at the right time that captures the human experience.
0:48:58 Gary Oldman: So they can do some really incredibly
0:49:01 Gary Oldman: human-like, the 90% like you mentioned,
0:49:07 Gary Oldman: human-like phrasing about the bulk of the storytelling.
0:49:12 Gary Oldman: But the magic, you know, whether it’s the endings of Red Dead Redemption one
0:49:18 Gary Oldman: and two, the timing of that, the word choice of that, everything around that.
0:49:21 Gary Oldman: But it’s hard to argue because they’re incredibly impressive,
0:49:23 Gary Oldman: winning all kinds of math competitions.
0:49:23 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
0:49:25 Gary Oldman: But it’s, what is that magic?
0:49:29 Gary Oldman: And again, that could be just a romantic human side of me,
0:49:32 Gary Oldman: just saying that LLM won’t be able to capture that,
0:49:34 Gary Oldman: maybe desperately holding on for hope.
0:49:38 Gary Oldman: I don’t think they’re going to come up with magic. I think they’re going to be fantastic
0:49:41 Gary Oldman: at coming up with really cheap, decent stuff.
0:49:44 Gary Oldman: I have to ask you about your writing process, and we could break it,
0:49:48 Gary Oldman: break it up. On Grand Theft Auto, GTA IV is when it really started ramping up.
0:49:53 Gary Oldman: How much writing went into the Grand Theft Auto series?
0:49:57 Gary Oldman: How many words are we talking about? I saw some thousands of pages.
0:50:02 Gary Oldman: I mean, when we printed out the scripts for GTA IV, it was about this high.
0:50:06 Gary Oldman: And GTA V is about that high. But that was including all the pedestrians who’d have
0:50:12 Gary Oldman: pages and pages just to create the illusion of a living world, because you interact
0:50:16 Gary Oldman: with each one of them. But even the main script for the main mission was thousands
0:50:17 Gary Oldman: of pages long.
0:50:21 Gary Oldman: What was the writing process like on that, to generate one page at a time?
0:50:26 Gary Oldman: Bit by bit by bit over several years. But you start with, once people are determined,
0:50:31 Gary Oldman: I mean, oh, here’s the world. We’re doing one based on a version of New York,
0:50:36 Gary Oldman: say GTA IV. And I was living in New York. I’ve been living in New York for a few years.
0:50:42 Gary Oldman: Wasn’t sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of
0:50:48 Gary Oldman: Of personal dramas as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of
0:50:53 Gary Oldman: GTA IV again recently, and it’s really dark. And I was like, oh, that’s why.
0:50:57 Gary Oldman: I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America.
0:51:02 Gary Oldman: My life felt in a lot of flux. As a company, we’d had all that hot coffee drama,
0:51:05 Gary Oldman: So I constantly thought we might be shut down in the middle of making that,
0:51:10 Gary Oldman: you know, a lot of drama in the company. So it felt like having had this run of
0:51:14 Gary Oldman: success and relative personal stability from
0:51:21 Gary Oldman: GTA III by City, San Andreas, suddenly 2005, six,
0:51:26 Gary Oldman: seven, early seven, life felt very unsure.
0:51:32 Gary Oldman: And that kind of bled into it. But in terms of the process, it was
0:51:40 Gary Oldman: trying to find an underbelly to New York and capture an immigrant experience. I’m not
0:51:44 Gary Oldman: entirely sure how accurate that immigrant experience was in 2000 and when the
0:51:47 Gary Oldman: game came out. And then tell it story from a different angle as an immigrant,
0:51:52 Gary Oldman: which I thought made it interesting. And then this sort of journey around these various
0:51:56 Gary Oldman: New York characters. So I kind of spent probably a year traveling around with
0:52:00 Gary Oldman: cops or meeting people on and off and, you know, wandering around New York and driving
0:52:03 Gary Oldman: around and, you know, on and off, you know, while you just go out for the morning from
0:52:11 Gary Oldman: the office, normal stuff. But doing that through 2005, assembling little notes,
0:52:15 Gary Oldman: here’s a funny character for this, here’s how figuring out how the order we want to
0:52:19 Gary Oldman: travel around the map in, um, characters of this, what was an interesting take on,
0:52:24 Gary Oldman: on, on the, you know, mob for that kind of time period. What was an interesting take on,
0:52:29 Gary Oldman: on, on some Jamaican hoodlums for that kind of time period and, um, assembling lots of
0:52:35 Gary Oldman: notes and more and more notes and really, really, really running away from the work,
0:52:38 Gary Oldman: which is, you know, I have to admit it’s part of my process. If there is any kind of
0:52:42 Gary Oldman: process which is not doing work, thinking about it, but not working, you know, a lot of time.
0:52:46 Gary Oldman: And then, and then it all kind of pages and pages of notes, make more notes,
0:52:51 Gary Oldman: no actual work months and months of this. And then, um, finally set myself a deadline,
0:52:53 Gary Oldman: told all the other people on, on the senior people on the team, okay,
0:52:57 Gary Oldman: I’ll have a story draft to you Monday morning. I can’t even remember what I want to say,
0:53:03 Gary Oldman: February the 1st. And then the weekend before was in a, in a cabin we, we, we, we had upstate,
0:53:08 Gary Oldman: and just stayed up all night, grab, knocking these notes into shape,
0:53:11 Gary Oldman: assemble about probably a 30 page documents,
0:53:14 Gary Oldman: a story synopsis and a character synopsis for each of the major characters,
0:53:17 Gary Oldman: and then hand that over and that gets broken.
0:53:21 Gary Oldman: That would get broken down with me and the designers. Um, and I was always clear,
0:53:23 Gary Oldman: I’m not a game designer. I’m a sort of creative director,
0:53:25 Gary Oldman: uh, with me and break that down into missions.
0:53:29 Gary Oldman: And then that takes another year or so of that slowly assembling and
0:53:31 Gary Oldman: then begin.
0:53:36 Gary Oldman: But the bulk of my work’s then done for a bit so I can relax and, and, and offer
0:53:40 Gary Oldman: opinions on other people’s work and feel, be lazy for a bit. And then, um,
0:53:45 Gary Oldman: start to worry because then I’ve actually soon I’ve got to start writing dialogue.
0:53:47 Gary Oldman: And for GTA 4 in particular is that we’re going to try and write,
0:53:49 Gary Oldman: you know, our animation is going to be a lot better,
0:53:51 Gary Oldman: our character models are going to start to look better,
0:53:55 Gary Oldman: the world is going to look amazing. Uh, therefore we can support better,
0:53:59 Gary Oldman: you know, longer scenes. We can have more in-depth characters. Uh,
0:54:03 Gary Oldman: But we’ve got to find a tone that works that with the game. Easy, no problem.
0:54:05 Gary Oldman: And I start to worry and worry and worry.
0:54:09 Gary Oldman: And, and also writing as a, as a Serbian immigrant. And I was an immigrant,
0:54:13 Gary Oldman: but I’m not Serbian. And trying to capture what on earth that would feel like.
0:54:17 Gary Oldman: So start to worry, start to worry again, avoid work for as long as possible. Um,
0:54:22 Gary Oldman: and then just sit down and start hammering away at a keyboard again late at night,
0:54:28 Gary Oldman: hammering away at a keyboard and going, does that right? Is that? And once I get one speech,
0:54:33 Gary Oldman: one turn of phrase that I would like for a character, then they suddenly come alive
0:54:39 Gary Oldman: in my head. And so it’s like writing with Nico and just, he’s a kind of, he’s awkward,
0:54:43 Gary Oldman: he’s out of town, but he’s got more self-assurance in some way, not the American
0:54:48 Gary Oldman: characters. And so once I kind of thought him through this, he’s just stepped slightly
0:54:52 Gary Oldman: back from their ridiculousness. And he’s that, then he started to come to life. And then I
0:54:58 Gary Oldman: would juxtapose him and his cousin who had this much more Americanized energy and that
0:55:01 Gary Oldman: felt like it was a good, a good double act. And then from there it starts to come to life.
0:55:07 Gary Oldman: And, and, but it’s written in small chunks, uh, for the motion kit. So then, then we’d
0:55:11 Gary Oldman: motion capture small chunks and then the other, other writers write the mission dialogue
0:55:16 Gary Oldman: for small chunks. And we’d slowly assemble the game, sort of 10, 15 missions at a
0:55:19 Gary Oldman: time over the next year and a half.
0:55:24 Gary Oldman: Do you remember a few maybe lines that, uh, brought Nico to life?
0:55:27 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a couple of,
0:55:32 Gary Oldman: it was his incredulity when his cousin picks him up in an old car and he’s not
0:55:36 Gary Oldman: living this fancy American lifestyle and his cousin’s foot, which was a kind of comic
0:55:41 Gary Oldman: moment and his cousin’s foot. And then they go to the cousin’s flat. And the cousin also,
0:55:45 Gary Oldman: even though he was a sort of a failure, was still upbeat. And then when he talked to the
0:55:50 Gary Oldman: cousin and he talked about his wartime experiences and how harrowing they were. And I was
0:55:54 Gary Oldman: like, this is, can I make this work in a game? It’s very different from stuff you normally
0:55:58 Gary Oldman: see in games. Is it going to feel ridiculous? And I remember being very scared because I thought,
0:56:04 Gary Oldman: it might be too much. It might feel over the top. I think, you know, the game’s so pretty.
0:56:07 Gary Oldman: The artists doing such an amazing job. The game’s looking, you know, I think we can get
0:56:12 Gary Oldman: away with this. Let’s try it. And then it, then they motion capture the animation. I was like,
0:56:17 Gary Oldman: yeah, it kind of works. And I think that moment, those were both pretty early. Once we had those,
0:56:23 Gary Oldman: you go, okay, we’ve now got comedy and tragedy in the game with this character. Now it’s working.
0:56:28 Gary Oldman: You remember, during the war, we did some bad things.
0:56:36 Gary Oldman: And bad things happen to us. War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old
0:56:45 Gary Oldman: and bitter into killing each other. I was very young. I’m very angry. Maybe that is no excuse.
0:56:54 Gary Oldman: Yeah, he escaped. He’s a veteran. He escaped the trauma of war to come to America to pursue
0:57:01 Gary Oldman: the American dream, I suppose, which became for him this thing that drags him back into violence.
0:57:08 Gary Oldman: Yes, he can never escape his sort of violent past or I don’t know if he can never escape it. He never does escape it.
0:57:12 Gary Oldman: You know, whether he’s got agency or not, it’s a whole nother question. Of course he doesn’t,
0:57:16 Gary Oldman: because he’s a character in a video game. But you know, whether he ever could have escaped
0:57:17 Gary Oldman: in another way, who knows?
0:57:26 Gary Oldman: I think he’s probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series.
0:57:36 Gary Oldman: Of all the characters you’ve written in Grand Theft Auto, would Nico be the best character you’ve created?
0:57:39 Gary Oldman: I think he’s the most
0:57:46 Gary Oldman: innovative and the most morally defensible in some ways.
0:57:51 Gary Oldman: He normally does a lot of stuff where he’s fighting for right. He’s the nicest person in some ways.
0:57:56 Gary Oldman: Is he the best protagonist of a GTA game? I think he’s the most innovative
0:58:02 Gary Oldman: protagonist of a GTA game. Structurally, he might be too nice in some ways. He’s also tough.
0:58:06 Gary Oldman: Like he just comes across as tough. I loved CJ and San Andreas. I thought Malay,
0:58:11 Gary Oldman: just the way he spoke gave him such humanity. So I just loved it. It wasn’t the writing,
0:58:17 Gary Oldman: it was the quality of the voice acting. It was just so strong for him. I think aspects of Michael,
0:58:23 Gary Oldman: he was so understated, but he loved the character, but he brought so much humanity to this
0:58:28 Gary Oldman: character who’s so flawed, who is such a, you know, he sold, has no principles. He sells
0:58:34 Gary Oldman: everyone out. We just kind of, I think Ned Luke did such an amazing job and didn’t necessarily
0:58:39 Gary Oldman: get as many, as many plaudits as Steven Ogg got for Trevor, and he was also wonderful. But I think
0:58:43 Gary Oldman: the Ned Luke character so, sort of anchors that game so much. So I like all of them in different
0:58:46 Gary Oldman: ways, but I probably love Nico the most.
0:58:52 Gary Oldman: And of course, Michael’s from Grand Theft Auto 5. And he’s one of three protagonists,
0:58:57 Gary Oldman: with also Franklin and Trevor. And you said that of the things you’re
0:59:02 Gary Oldman: proud of creating and you think was a great accomplishment, it was Red Dead Redemption 2,
0:59:04 Gary Oldman: the ending of Red Dead Redemption 1,
0:59:10 Gary Oldman: all of Grand Theft Auto 4, and the middle part of Grand Theft Auto 5, when the
0:59:15 Gary Oldman: three characters come together, can you speak to the Grand Theft Auto 5? Is there
0:59:19 Gary Oldman: some degree, I don’t know if you’re a Dostoevsky guy, but is there some
0:59:23 Gary Oldman: aspect of the three protagonists, sort of,
0:59:27 Gary Oldman: you know, brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, Dmitri, and Ivan,
0:59:31 Gary Oldman: sort of using the protagonists to explore the spectrum of
0:59:35 Gary Oldman: human nature, and just the tension between them, that allows you
0:59:39 Gary Oldman: the three of them become a character in themselves.
0:59:40 Gary Oldman: Their relationship.
0:59:41 Gary Oldman: Their relationship.
0:59:46 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it was, I think one of the reasons that the team did such,
0:59:51 Gary Oldman: that Grand Theft Auto is still so popular, is we always tried as a group to really
0:59:54 Gary Oldman: innovate from game to game, within the confines of what it was. It was a crime,
1:00:00 Gary Oldman: it was a crime drama, you know, it began as a crime sim in GTA 1, about stealing,
1:00:04 Gary Oldman: you know, two top-down cars. And we always tried to innovate with the narrative,
1:00:08 Gary Oldman: and innovate with the art direction, innovate with every piece of the game.
1:00:10 Gary Oldman: And I think having done,
1:00:14 Gary Oldman: you know, GTA 4, which was this kind of operatic
1:00:16 Gary Oldman: journey for this big lead character,
1:00:18 Gary Oldman: and then these two extra stories that came afterwards,
1:00:22 Gary Oldman: the challenge was, can we combine,
1:00:25 Gary Oldman: can we make a video game,
1:00:26 Gary Oldman: which tends to be very much focused on
1:00:29 Gary Oldman: one protagonist, but have multi-protagonists,
1:00:35 Gary Oldman: and the technical challenge of moving from character
1:00:37 Gary Oldman: to character, the team did such an amazing
1:00:39 Gary Oldman: job that I don’t think people realized how hard it was,
1:00:41 Gary Oldman: but we would sit there just sort of holding our heads
1:00:43 Gary Oldman: because they hurt so much around like,
1:00:45 Gary Oldman: what happens if you do this, then do that,
1:00:49 Gary Oldman: it’s just, this is so hard. Why have we decided to do this?
1:00:52 Gary Oldman: It’s horrible. And then it all came together.
1:00:58 Gary Oldman: I think the idea was, develop three characters who do feel like characters.
1:01:01 Gary Oldman: They don’t just feel like philosophical,
1:01:06 Gary Oldman: or psychological avatars, but where one is really driven by ego,
1:01:10 Gary Oldman: one is really driven by id, and one is really driven by trying to get ahead,
1:01:13 Gary Oldman: so some kind of representation of the superego,
1:01:16 Gary Oldman: and see how that feels when they all play off against each other.
1:01:20 Gary Oldman: One of the most upvoted questions on Reddit about GTA 5,
1:01:26 Gary Oldman: from a fan. “GTA 5 is my favorite game ever made. I spent over 1,000 hours in the world
1:01:33 Gary Oldman: of GTA 5 and GTA Online. GTA 4 is a hard second or third. It never ceases to impress me.
1:01:37 Gary Oldman: When you lead a team of over 1,000 people to make a masterpiece like GTA 5 or
1:01:41 Gary Oldman: Red Dead Redemption 2, how do you ensure that the bar of perfection is always met?
1:01:44 Gary Oldman: How is that even possible? We know the answer isn’t money,
1:01:46 Gary Oldman: because there’s other studios with a lot of money,
1:01:50 Gary Oldman: and they are two decades behind Rockstar. So what does it take
1:01:53 Gary Oldman: to create these worlds, to create these incredibly compelling games?
1:01:59 Gary Oldman: I mean, certainly when I was at Rockstar, I was a
1:02:05 Gary Oldman: worker amongst workers. You know, the culture was one of excellence and
1:02:10 Gary Oldman: tried to provide creative clarity. And people were just,
1:02:12 Gary Oldman: and also an ambition to make.
1:02:19 Gary Oldman: I think we were like, we thought GTA 3 could be really popular. But really popular to us
1:02:23 Gary Oldman: meant quite honestly, it’s going to sell 2 or 3 million copies. And we thought we were
1:02:27 Gary Oldman: making something pretty innovative. I mean, we knew we were making something innovative,
1:02:29 Gary Oldman: but we didn’t know if people would understand how innovative it was.
1:02:35 Gary Oldman: And then when we got the chance to make Vice City and to try and repeat it,
1:02:38 Gary Oldman: I think every time from then on, the team was very driven to make something better.
1:02:42 Gary Oldman: And to use, long before we had lots of resources,
1:02:47 Gary Oldman: to use time and whatever money we had to always put impressive stuff on the screen,
1:02:52 Gary Oldman: always think about what we can do to push the medium of video games,
1:02:57 Gary Oldman: and the sort of medium of building fake worlds further. And that was always,
1:03:04 Gary Oldman: it was both clarity of here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what the tone of the game
1:03:08 Gary Oldman: is going to be. Here’s how features will fit into that, and so why these features would
1:03:13 Gary Oldman: work and these features wouldn’t work. Because fundamentally, by 2002, you could put pretty
1:03:18 Gary Oldman: much any feature into a game you wanted. There wasn’t a technical limitation. It was just
1:03:23 Gary Oldman: making it cohesive. And then it was also just everyone committing to a culture of excellence.
1:03:27 Gary Oldman: Navi Kansari, an award-winning director and virtual reality game maker,
1:03:32 Gary Oldman: who worked with you on a number of Grand Theft Auto games, spoke highly about his time
1:03:37 Gary Oldman: working with you. Quote, “We always worked ourselves to the bone, but it wasn’t coming from
1:03:42 Gary Oldman: from the top down. Sam and Dan always rolled up their sleeves, and they were always
1:03:47 Gary Oldman: there. They never left us holding the bag. We all thought we were making bad-ass
1:03:53 Gary Oldman: shit. So it didn’t matter how hard we worked.” So I’m sure there were some tough grinds.
1:03:57 Gary Oldman: Finishing it is certainly, it’s tough, but it also is, you know,
1:04:03 Gary Oldman: intensely rewarding. And you get something done, and you’ve made something. And that feeling is,
1:04:07 Gary Oldman: as you say, really, really incredible. I mean, because sometimes it’s a little bit empty
1:04:11 Gary Oldman: as well. Because when you finish it, you’re like, “My life’s got nothing to it.” And
1:04:15 Gary Oldman: then you have to, you know, but that’s the same with any big undertaking that you take.
1:04:18 Gary Oldman: I don’t think that, you know, when you’re working that hard, you do not have a good
1:04:22 Gary Oldman: work-life balance. But the truth is, you’re not working that hard all of the time.
1:04:24 Gary Oldman: Yeah. So you have to just manage it slightly differently.
1:04:28 Gary Oldman: Man, that’s such a heavy thing about the human experience. I’ve talked to Olympic
1:04:33 Gary Oldman: gold winners, and many of them face real depression after they win the gold medal.
1:04:34 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:04:39 Gary Oldman: Because they’ve been pursuing a thing that they deeply care about. This has been
1:04:45 Gary Oldman: everything. And they are truly happy to do it. And then it’s like, what else is there in
1:04:51 Gary Oldman: life? Compared to this, what else is there? So that’s the ups and downs of life.
1:04:55 Gary Oldman: You need the darkness, you need the lows to really experience the highs.
1:05:02 Gary Oldman: Let me ask you about the pressure. There’s an insane level of excitement and expectation
1:05:10 Gary Oldman: for Grand Theft Auto 6. Same was true for GTA 5 and GTA 4. And even before that. And you
1:05:18 Gary Oldman: and the team delivered every time. How difficult was it to do creative work under such
1:05:21 Gary Oldman: pressure, where everyone expects this to be a success?
1:05:29 Gary Oldman: I was pretty good at compartmentalizing. You know, and it just saying, and I try just to go,
1:05:36 Gary Oldman: and with all creative work, I go, I feel like a terrible fraud, but I haven’t been found out
1:05:42 Gary Oldman: yet. Just do my best and hopefully I won’t be found out this time. And just if I can be,
1:05:48 Gary Oldman: if I can go, I tried hard with the work. I tried to do it with integrity. I tried not to copy
1:05:52 Gary Oldman: someone else. I’ve probably done all of the above. You know, try to bring something new to it.
1:05:59 Gary Oldman: And we as a group made something we are proud of. Then that’s enough. You can’t, if you don’t
1:06:03 Gary Oldman: want to go insane, or if I didn’t want to go insane, I couldn’t sit there and worry about
1:06:07 Gary Oldman: financial results. You know, if we made something great and it didn’t sell, that would have to be okay.
1:06:14 Gary Oldman: Because the goal is to make something that’s, you know, video games are expensive. So it is a
1:06:20 Gary Oldman: sort of commercial form of creativity. It’s a commercial art form, you know. So you have
1:06:25 Gary Oldman: to be in Lunkmire, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try
1:06:29 Gary Oldman: make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we,
1:06:33 Gary Oldman: the way to make it back is to try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing
1:06:39 Gary Oldman: in the same direction. I think GTA 4 was very pressured because there’d been all this
1:06:45 Gary Oldman: pressure on the company. The company nearly imploded several times due to hot coffee. It was
1:06:50 Gary Oldman: extremely tough. So I think that felt very stressful. GTA 3, the company, was basically broke.
1:06:55 Gary Oldman: But I was young, I didn’t really care. You know, I wasn’t living in the grown-up world yet.
1:06:59 Gary Oldman: All of them had their own pressure. All of the games had their own pressure. All the more
1:07:05 Gary Oldman: I felt I’d gone into it creatively and tried to be more ambitious. For me personally,
1:07:10 Gary Oldman: I felt more pressure when it came out that that would have been the right choice.
1:07:15 Gary Oldman: Because again, if you’re trying to take big swings creatively and you’ve spent a lot
1:07:21 Gary Oldman: of money, that can be quite stressful. I think with Red Dead 2, when we were behind schedule,
1:07:27 Gary Oldman: we were over budget so much, I didn’t want to think about it. And you’re making a game about
1:07:32 Gary Oldman: a cowboy dying of TB and the games not coming together. Turns out a lot of people doubt
1:07:36 Gary Oldman: you at that moment. You know, it’s not that fun. So I think that was a lot of pressure.
1:07:41 Gary Oldman: But you know, anything, if you’re doing something new, you know, the new stuff,
1:07:44 Gary Oldman: there’s not necessarily pressure on releasing a comic book or in the same way,
1:07:47 Gary Oldman: because it’s not taken as long. But you know, if you’re making things,
1:07:49 Gary Oldman: there’s always pressure that people are going to like it.
1:07:54 Gary Oldman: Why do you think there was so much excitement about GTA 4, GTA 5, and now GTA 6?
1:07:59 Gary Oldman: Because they don’t come out that regularly. And I think we did a really
1:08:04 Gary Oldman: good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt
1:08:07 Gary Oldman: different. You know, people have very strong feelings. I like this one. I didn’t
1:08:10 Gary Oldman: like that one as much. Because they are pretty different. So there would be a
1:08:13 Gary Oldman: simultaneously where you know what’s going to happen. It’s a Grand Theft Auto. You know
1:08:17 Gary Oldman: it’s going to be a game about being a criminal. But the way it’s going to be a game
1:08:21 Gary Oldman: is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving meant people
1:08:25 Gary Oldman: being really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We really
1:08:31 Gary Oldman: tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing,
1:08:33 Gary Oldman: where you were really felt like you’re already in the product just because you’d seen
1:08:34 Gary Oldman: the trailers and stuff.
1:08:39 Gary Oldman: You mentioned that you haven’t written for Grand Theft Auto 6. What’s it feel
1:08:43 Gary Oldman: like Grand Theft Auto 6 returning to Vice City? This is over 20 years later,
1:08:47 Gary Oldman: but the original GTA Vice City game was set in the 80s.
1:08:51 Gary Oldman: So maybe inspired by Scarface? A little bit?
1:08:53 Gary Oldman: Scarface, Miami Vice.
1:08:53 Gary Oldman: Miami Vice.
1:08:56 Gary Oldman: And our 80s childhoods.
1:09:00 Gary Oldman: You know, what I realized quite a while ago, unfortunately, was
1:09:04 Gary Oldman: that we made that game and it was set, I think, in 86.
1:09:08 Gary Oldman: And we made it in 2002. So it’s 16 years after.
1:09:12 Gary Oldman: And now it’s way past 16 years since Vice City came out.
1:09:15 Gary Oldman: So it was, the 80s were not that long ago when we made it.
1:09:18 Gary Oldman: You know, I think Miami is one of the most unique cities in the world.
1:09:19 Gary Oldman: Oh yeah.
1:09:21 Gary Oldman: Especially if you’re thinking about satirizing American culture.
1:09:26 Gary Oldman: It has this duality of a glossy surface and a dark underworld.
1:09:29 Gary Oldman: It has the influencers, it has the crypto bros, the yachts,
1:09:33 Gary Oldman: bikinis, plastic surgery, sports cars, drugs, cartel cash, luxury,
1:09:37 Gary Oldman: super rich people, and the desperately poor, just the whole of it.
1:09:41 Gary Oldman: Would it be like the perfect city to explore the full
1:09:46 Gary Oldman: cast of characters that are possible that human nature can generate?
1:09:49 Gary Oldman: I think it’s one of them, you know, there’s a reason why
1:09:53 Gary Oldman: GTA kept coming back to Miami, New York, Los Angeles.
1:09:57 Gary Oldman: I think they’re all very good for exactly what you laid out.
1:10:00 Gary Oldman: You know, you could say, move it to any of those and it would work.
1:10:04 Gary Oldman: So yeah, there’s a melting pot aspect to New York also, right?
1:10:07 Gary Oldman: Yeah, a melting pot aspect to LA, you know, there’s glitz, glamour,
1:10:12 Gary Oldman: underbelly, immigrants, you know, enormous wealth in all of them.
1:10:16 Gary Oldman: I think those are what I think are really fun for any, not even just for GTA,
1:10:20 Gary Oldman: but for anything where you want a kind of slice of life, almost like a sort of
1:10:22 Gary Oldman: psychotic version of a Dickens book.
1:10:25 Gary Oldman: You know, this big slice of life, he did it with London.
1:10:30 Gary Oldman: You know, this psychotic version of these, you know, big, all kinds of characters
1:10:34 Gary Oldman: in a melting pot, any of these global cities worked well for that.
1:10:40 Gary Oldman: Do you know if that was ever a consideration to go elsewhere to like a London?
1:10:44 Gary Oldman: We made a little thing in London 26 years ago, GTA London.
1:10:51 Gary Oldman: For the top down for the PS1, that was pretty cute and fun as the first mission
1:10:52 Gary Oldman: pack ever for PlayStation 1.
1:10:59 Gary Oldman: I think for a full GTA game, we always decided it was, there was so much Americana
1:11:04 Gary Oldman: inherent in the IP, it would be really hard to make it work in London or anywhere else.
1:11:07 Gary Oldman: You know, you needed guns, you needed these larger than life characters.
1:11:12 Gary Oldman: You know, it just, it just felt like it was, the game was so much about America.
1:11:17 Gary Oldman: You know, possibly from an outsider’s perspective, but you know, that, that was so
1:11:20 Gary Oldman: much about what the thing was that it wouldn’t really work in the same way elsewhere.
1:11:25 Gary Oldman: So you’ve, you’ve created, I don’t know how many, over 10 Grand Theft Auto games.
1:11:25 Gary Oldman: I think so.
1:11:30 Gary Oldman: I have to ask, is it a little bit bittersweet to say,
1:11:34 Gary Oldman: to not be part, to say goodbye to the Grand Theft Auto world,
1:11:39 Gary Oldman: and having to watch Grand Theft Auto 6 released, or is it more excitement?
1:11:40 Gary Oldman: Is it, what’s the feeling?
1:11:46 Gary Oldman: I think it’s a, it’s, how would I describe it?
1:11:50 Gary Oldman: Of course, it’s all, all of the above, you know, it’s, it’s exactly as you, you know,
1:11:56 Gary Oldman: pleased to be doing other stuff, excited for what we’re working on now, super excited.
1:12:03 Gary Oldman: Um, of course, letting go of something, I worked on it one way or another for like 20
1:12:09 Gary Oldman: years, you know, and, and, and wrote on them for the last 10 or 11 that came out,
1:12:12 Gary Oldman: wrote all of them, or, you know, lead writer and all of them, whatever it was.
1:12:24 Gary Oldman: So of course, letting go of that is, you know, is a big, is a big change and, and a lot, and, and sad in a way, um, because
1:12:28 Gary Oldman: it was, each of the games was a kind of standalone story.
1:12:34 Gary Oldman: It’s not quite the same as, as I think probably it would be in some ways sadder if someone
1:12:38 Gary Oldman: continued on Red Dead because it was a cohesive two game arc.
1:12:41 Gary Oldman: That might be more sad to hear someone working on that.
1:12:43 Gary Oldman: But again, not that, that will probably happen too.
1:12:44 Gary Oldman: They’re not, I don’t own the IP.
1:12:47 Gary Oldman: That was the sort of part of the, the, the deal.
1:12:49 Gary Oldman: It’s a privilege to work on stuff, but you don’t necessarily own it.
1:12:53 Gary Oldman: When you’re done with the game, does it always feel like a goodbye?
1:12:58 Gary Oldman: Like when you sit, when you’re done with, uh, Red Dead 2 is like, you’re saying goodbye to Arthur.
1:13:01 Gary Oldman: Like the characters you created, you’re walking away.
1:13:05 Gary Oldman: You kind of are to Arthur in the end of the game, even before the end of the game.
1:13:10 Gary Oldman: Um, yeah, I think you’ve got, you know, I’ve been with them for seven, eight years,
1:13:13 Gary Oldman: and you have to kind of let it go or you can’t go on to the next one.
1:13:14 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:13:16 Gary Oldman: So there’s always this thing of, of, okay, that’s done.
1:13:19 Gary Oldman: And sometimes people would ask me questions about older games.
1:13:22 Gary Oldman: And certainly when I was in the middle of making new ones in this,
1:13:24 Gary Oldman: I couldn’t necessarily even remember.
1:13:27 Gary Oldman: I’ve got a pretty good memory normally because you kind of have to let it go.
1:13:32 Gary Oldman: So I, it’s, it’s not, it’s, you’re so immersed in it and thinking about it.
1:13:35 Gary Oldman: And certainly in that last period, the last few months, you’re really, really immersed
1:13:38 Gary Oldman: in every little nuance and every little detail all of the time.
1:13:40 Gary Oldman: And then you’re just not thinking about it in the same way.
1:13:41 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:13:47 Gary Oldman: It’s funny from the player perspective, it feels like an old friend that I miss, whether
1:13:50 Gary Oldman: there’s John or Arthur or Nico, it’s a real goodbye.
1:13:52 Gary Oldman: That’s the, there’s a real sadness to finishing a video game.
1:13:53 Gary Oldman: I hope so.
1:13:59 Gary Oldman: Legitimately a sad experience, not just because the story is sad or.
1:14:00 Gary Oldman: Because you’ve been with them so long.
1:14:01 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:14:03 Gary Oldman: And it’s a real goodbye to close it.
1:14:07 Gary Oldman: There’s that feeling when you’re sort of close the video game.
1:14:11 Gary Oldman: And it’s, I mean, it’s like saying goodbye to a friend.
1:14:14 Gary Oldman: That’s when you finish a book you love.
1:14:15 Gary Oldman: It’s the same feeling.
1:14:20 Gary Oldman: And I think that was something that we really, in the early days of Rockstar,
1:14:23 Gary Oldman: really aspired to have that, where people would have that.
1:14:27 Gary Oldman: It wasn’t just the mania of, of clearing a level, but the feeling of saying
1:14:29 Gary Oldman: goodbye to characters.
1:14:33 Gary Oldman: You know, I think that was something we really wanted to achieve in games that we
1:14:34 Gary Oldman: didn’t know was even possible.
1:14:37 Gary Oldman: So to hear people say that is incredibly rewarding.
1:14:38 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:14:42 Gary Oldman: The end of on the road by Kerouac, forlorn rags of growing old.
1:14:46 Gary Oldman: I just remember closing that thinking, what the fuck am I doing in this big world?
1:14:49 Gary Oldman: It’s a melancholic feeling, but there’s nothing like that feeling.
1:14:50 Gary Oldman: And you’ve achieved that.
1:14:54 Gary Oldman: It’s so rare in video games to be able to achieve that with Red Dead.
1:14:56 Gary Oldman: And for me, it was Grand Theft Auto 4 with Nico.
1:15:02 Gary Oldman: I have to ask about, in the 2018 interview, you talked about satirizing American
1:15:04 Gary Oldman: culture, which I think Grand Theft Auto was trying to do.
1:15:09 Gary Oldman: And you’ve made, I think, a really powerful observation that on the political front,
1:15:11 Gary Oldman: people are getting more divided.
1:15:16 Gary Oldman: It’s getting more absurd and ridiculous and extreme.
1:15:21 Gary Oldman: So it’s becoming harder and harder to satirize because of how rapidly it’s becoming
1:15:25 Gary Oldman: ridiculous, you’re talking about that you don’t even know from Grand Theft Auto 6
1:15:30 Gary Oldman: if it’s possible to satirize, because by the time you release the thing,
1:15:36 Gary Oldman: it’s already going to be outdated in terms of the satire will become reality, essentially.
1:15:41 Gary Oldman: First of all, it’d be nice to get your updated view on that.
1:15:43 Gary Oldman: Second of all, it seems like you’ve answered your
1:15:49 Gary Oldman: very own comment with the American caper, which seems to satirize American
1:15:53 Gary Oldman: cultured just fine in how much over the top it goes.
1:15:54 Gary Oldman: Anyway, there’s lots of questions in there.
1:15:59 Gary Oldman: One of the things we’ve enjoyed about doing a comic book is that we are, it
1:16:03 Gary Oldman: still has lead times, but the lead times are not four or five years.
1:16:04 Gary Oldman: The lead times are, you know,
1:16:08 Gary Oldman: a year when we’re putting, we can make little updates much, much newer.
1:16:14 Gary Oldman: And we’re, you know, we’re just wrapping issue 10 of a, of a 12 issue arc for that.
1:16:19 Gary Oldman: So it’s not quite, it’s not quite as difficult.
1:16:20 Gary Oldman: You still can get the tone of it.
1:16:24 Gary Oldman: Um, but yeah, I think it’s, uh, I think it’s an issue.
1:16:30 Gary Oldman: Anyone trying to talk about this current era, which began in 2015,
1:16:35 Gary Oldman: 2016 is going to have of how do you characterize it when things move so quickly
1:16:35 Gary Oldman: and so fast.
1:16:39 Gary Oldman: So American capers, first of all, epic comic book.
1:16:39 Gary Oldman: I love it.
1:16:40 Gary Oldman: The art.
1:16:41 Gary Oldman: Yeah, the art’s beautiful.
1:16:42 Gary Oldman: David Lapham is the artist.
1:16:43 Gary Oldman: He did an amazing job.
1:16:47 Gary Oldman: He is a, he is a wonderful, wonderful storyteller.
1:16:49 Gary Oldman: What made you want to set in Wyoming?
1:16:53 Gary Oldman: I hadn’t seen a modern story there that I knew about.
1:16:57 Gary Oldman: I started to spend a bit more time in the Rockies and in the West.
1:17:02 Gary Oldman: And I was like, I’d spent a lot of time in like the countryside in upstate New
1:17:05 Gary Oldman: York and, and thought never really captured it quite right.
1:17:08 Gary Oldman: And just the idea of these places as they change.
1:17:12 Gary Oldman: It didn’t, it was a way of doing a crime story that didn’t feel the same as a
1:17:13 Gary Oldman: GTA.
1:17:15 Gary Oldman: You know, it was not somewhere you would necessarily set a GTA, but it felt like
1:17:17 Gary Oldman: it was really interesting and underexplored.
1:17:19 Gary Oldman: And there is over the top stuff.
1:17:20 Gary Oldman: There’s, there’s.
1:17:22 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it’s definitely slightly over the top.
1:17:23 Gary Oldman: So let me take notes on this.
1:17:26 Gary Oldman: There’s a spoiler alert, I guess, from the first issue, I believe.
1:17:34 Gary Oldman: There’s a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel
1:17:36 Gary Oldman: as a form of religious atonement.
1:17:41 Gary Oldman: He’s not necessarily, you know, the sharpest tool in the box.
1:17:48 Gary Oldman: And his, his, his rather cynical boss is using his, his religion and some mistakes
1:17:51 Gary Oldman: he’s made to blackmail him into murdering business associates.
1:17:56 Gary Oldman: And of course, there’s this Shakespearean sort of two neighbors situation.
1:18:01 Gary Oldman: And each of them having a duality of who they are in terms of good and evil.
1:18:05 Gary Oldman: So there’s a wall street transplant who wants to be a cowboy.
1:18:05 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:18:09 Gary Oldman: Who loves to manually harvest bull semen.
1:18:11 Gary Oldman: Accurate?
1:18:14 Gary Oldman: I mean, this is the notes I’ve been taking.
1:18:20 Gary Oldman: He is a, he is a somewhat confused, longevity obsessed.
1:18:20 Gary Oldman: Right.
1:18:25 Gary Oldman: Rich dude who’s run away to Wyoming and is living out an assortment of fantasies.
1:18:26 Gary Oldman: And bull semen is
1:18:27 Gary Oldman: He’s a big component of longevity.
1:18:27 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:18:34 Gary Oldman: He’s very into all the life hacking, uh, you know, roid roiding HGH and and making money.
1:18:37 Gary Oldman: And he’s lost his mind living on a big ranch.
1:18:43 Gary Oldman: Of course, on the theme of satire, there is a woman who sleeps in tactical gear
1:18:48 Gary Oldman: and is consumed by online conspiracies, like especially pedophiles in DC.
1:18:49 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:18:53 Gary Oldman: Based on someone I know who got completely red pilled.
1:18:57 Gary Oldman: And I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening to people.
1:18:58 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:19:00 Gary Oldman: So, you know, satire of American culture.
1:19:02 Gary Oldman: Quick pause.
1:19:02 Gary Oldman: Bath and break.
1:19:03 Gary Oldman: Sure.
1:19:09 Gary Oldman: I think GTA five had the biggest launch of video game history and uh, GTA six
1:19:15 Gary Oldman: has the potential to uh, topping that first of all, do you think it will and
1:19:19 Gary Oldman: more broadly, what was your definition of success for a video game?
1:19:25 Gary Oldman: I would assume it will because it’s so anticipated and anticipation is the
1:19:31 Gary Oldman: best driver of early sales as we saw with GTA four versus Red Dead Redemption one,
1:19:34 Gary Oldman: you know, GTA four far more anticipated sold much better early on.
1:19:36 Gary Oldman: So I would assume it will sell really well.
1:19:44 Gary Oldman: That was never my definition of success, but you certainly wanted to make money.
1:19:46 Gary Oldman: You know, you’re spending someone’s money.
1:19:49 Gary Oldman: So the number one success is, are you making that money back plus a dollar?
1:19:53 Gary Oldman: At some level, that has to be the single most important thing.
1:19:54 Gary Oldman: So you get to do it again.
1:19:58 Gary Oldman: You know, you’ve got big teams of people, people need to pay the rent.
1:20:00 Gary Oldman: You have to keep the lights on in the business.
1:20:02 Gary Oldman: So you have to make a small profit.
1:20:05 Gary Oldman: If you think in that way, that keeps you being creative.
1:20:07 Gary Oldman: I think that was trying to forget about that.
1:20:08 Gary Oldman: It’s not really an option.
1:20:11 Gary Oldman: But we almost always did that.
1:20:13 Gary Oldman: We didn’t quite always do that, but we almost always did that.
1:20:16 Gary Oldman: I think the definition of success for me was,
1:20:21 Gary Oldman: had we tried to do new things and done them or achieved some of our goals.
1:20:22 Gary Oldman: That was the thing that I’m at.
1:20:27 Gary Oldman: Were people responding to these worlds and these characters in a way that I wanted them to.
1:20:31 Gary Oldman: Is it crazy to you that video games are able to make billions of dollars?
1:20:34 Gary Oldman: When if you look at like the eighties and nineties,
1:20:38 Gary Oldman: You know, nobody took video games seriously and even in the arts.
1:20:44 Gary Oldman: And now they’re basically, I mean, it’s very possible if you look at 10,
1:20:49 Gary Oldman: 20 years from now that video games surpass film as a way to consume stories.
1:20:53 Gary Oldman: I think they’ve possibly already done that in some ways.
1:20:57 Gary Oldman: And certainly as a business proposition, they’ve already done that.
1:21:00 Gary Oldman: But I think that’s not, you know, as a way of telling stories,
1:21:06 Gary Oldman: I think they’re better at telling certain kinds of stories and films are better
1:21:07 Gary Oldman: other kinds of stories.
1:21:11 Gary Oldman: You know, I think I think if you want a long discursive adventure,
1:21:12 Gary Oldman: a video game is better.
1:21:15 Gary Oldman: If you want a short, tight experience, a film is better.
1:21:17 Gary Oldman: We always felt games were the coming medium.
1:21:23 Gary Oldman: And so spent 20 years saying games of the future, games of the future.
1:21:28 Gary Oldman: And, you know, being sneered at, them being laughed at, them being having
1:21:31 Gary Oldman: people nod their heads, and then it kind of happening.
1:21:36 Gary Oldman: So, you know, at the same time, much as you might say something, you don’t necessarily
1:21:37 Gary Oldman: believe it’s going to be true.
1:21:39 Gary Oldman: But it has become true.
1:21:42 Gary Oldman: And I think still the games are only going to get better,
1:21:45 Gary Oldman: more interesting, more creatively, you know, diverse.
1:21:49 Gary Oldman: You said that Red Dead Redemption 2,
1:21:51 Gary Oldman: in your opinion, is the best thing you’ve ever done.
1:21:54 Gary Oldman: I think there’s a strong case to be made that it’s the greatest game of all
1:21:55 Gary Oldman: time.
1:21:59 Gary Oldman: What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think?
1:22:04 Gary Oldman: I think you had an incredibly strong team working together that was very experienced,
1:22:11 Gary Oldman: that had basically been in place since somewhere between 2001 and 2006.
1:22:13 Gary Oldman: So it was a long, experienced team.
1:22:17 Gary Oldman: I think we got to spend a smaller group of us working on it from day one,
1:22:23 Gary Oldman: coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game.
1:22:27 Gary Oldman: And then we kind of had to follow through with that I think was helpful that we
1:22:30 Gary Oldman: got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.
1:22:34 Gary Oldman: I think that the cowboy setting
1:22:38 Gary Oldman: is great because it gives a sort of mythic
1:22:42 Gary Oldman: seriousness that sometimes doing stuff in a contemporary setting doesn’t allow.
1:22:46 Gary Oldman: You know, I think the closest we got to that kind of seriousness was GTA 4,
1:22:49 Gary Oldman: but it just can’t, once you’re setting things in the modern world, they’re too frenetic.
1:22:55 Gary Oldman: You can’t get some of that slightly, you know, operatic feel that I love,
1:22:57 Gary Oldman: that some people think is maybe a little over the top.
1:22:59 Gary Oldman: But I, you know, I love this kind of, you know,
1:23:03 Gary Oldman: people searching for meaning within amongst the violence.
1:23:06 Gary Oldman: I think that the West and all of the themes around the West really lend
1:23:10 Gary Oldman: itself to that. So I think that, and then the gunplay was fantastic.
1:23:14 Gary Oldman: And the horses were incredible. So I think you had this combination of kind of
1:23:20 Gary Oldman: technical know how, a very, very strong team and really strong material.
1:23:23 Gary Oldman: Where did you have to go to in your mind, maybe philosophically,
1:23:26 Gary Oldman: maybe spiritually to be able to create the RDR world?
1:23:30 Gary Oldman: So of course it was based on Red Dead Revolver,
1:23:36 Gary Oldman: But that’s, that’s a fundamentally different. I mean, that leap into the great mythic
1:23:43 Gary Oldman: story that was Red Dead Redemption one, and then even more so Red Dead Redemption two.
1:23:49 Gary Oldman: That was unlike anything you or maybe anyone has ever created in video games.
1:23:51 Gary Oldman: Thank you.
1:23:53 Gary Oldman: So like what drugs were involved?
1:23:54 Gary Oldman: No drugs.
1:23:55 Gary Oldman: Okay.
1:23:57 Gary Oldman: No, stop the drugs long before.
1:23:57 Gary Oldman: Okay.
1:23:58 Gary Oldman: That’s why I did all that work.
1:24:00 Gary Oldman: I had nothing else to do.
1:24:06 Gary Oldman: So yeah, open world video games were very good for my mental health in that way.
1:24:06 Gary Oldman: Kept me busy.
1:24:12 Gary Oldman: But Red, so Red Dead, I’ll tell you, I’ll give you the, my version.
1:24:14 Gary Oldman: Now games are made by big teams.
1:24:14 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:24:19 Gary Oldman: So I will give you my human interest version of the story from my perspective only.
1:24:24 Gary Oldman: We, we made Red Dead Revolver, decided that, or finished Red Dead Revolver,
1:24:26 Gary Oldman: that’d been a Capcom game and they didn’t want to finish it.
1:24:28 Gary Oldman: So we finished it and they released in Japan
1:24:31 Gary Oldman: And we released it in the US in, I think, 2004.
1:24:35 Gary Oldman: And decided we would start work on open world
1:24:37 Gary Oldman: Cowboy game for PS3.
1:24:41 Gary Oldman: Didn’t think too much more about it.
1:24:43 Gary Oldman: And that was a bunch of other stuff to work on.
1:24:53 Gary Oldman: And slowly 2005, 2006, the game started to come to life, began to meet with the lead
1:25:01 Gary Oldman: designer, Christian Cantemessa, and thrash out a few ideas and story ideas for the game and
1:25:04 Gary Oldman: begin to think about some stuff and start thinking about what works for an open world
1:25:06 Gary Oldman: game, what works for a cowboy game.
1:25:10 Gary Oldman: And again, was being lazy or procrastinating.
1:25:14 Gary Oldman: Can we just, on a small tangent, when you mention you take notes when you’re being
1:25:16 Gary Oldman: lazy, what do those notes look like?
1:25:17 Gary Oldman: Are they like doodles?
1:25:23 Gary Oldman: They look like either a yellow pad or a BlackBerry in those days or an iPhone in these
1:25:23 Gary Oldman: days.
1:25:27 Gary Oldman: I’ll write the subject matter and then just email myself a note.
1:25:28 Gary Oldman: Here’s a good idea.
1:25:30 Gary Oldman: Or it might be scribbling on a pad.
1:25:35 Gary Oldman: And then I’ll assemble, if they’re done digitally, then I’ll assemble
1:25:37 Gary Oldman: them into one long word file.
1:25:41 Gary Oldman: And then I’ll look at them and go, here’s an idea, here’s an idea, here’s an idea,
1:25:43 Gary Oldman: and see if it comes to anything.
1:25:46 Gary Oldman: See if I aggregate them together and then read through them.
1:25:48 Gary Oldman: If there’s anything coherent there.
1:25:50 Gary Oldman: A character like this, a character like that.
1:25:52 Gary Oldman: This would be a funny line.
1:25:53 Gary Oldman: This is a line for the main character.
1:25:56 Gary Oldman: Actually make the main character work like this.
1:25:57 Gary Oldman: Or what about this relationship?
1:26:02 Gary Oldman: As I start to just play around with, what about if we start in that place,
1:26:05 Gary Oldman: go to that place, just start to play around with all of the different bits and pieces.
1:26:11 Gary Oldman: And we begun to flesh out some flow for the start of the game.
1:26:14 Gary Oldman: And this idea you’d start in dusty American West, which meant we didn’t have to
1:26:18 Gary Oldman: make too many trees, and then go to Mexico, and then come back.
1:26:20 Gary Oldman: And we had a sort of loose flow.
1:26:24 Gary Oldman: And I was really scared of writing any actual dialogue.
1:26:30 Gary Oldman: And I didn’t have a clue how to go about it.
1:26:32 Gary Oldman: And it’ll come, it’ll come.
1:26:35 Gary Oldman: And then, and I kept, I could postpone if ages were doing GTA 4.
1:26:37 Gary Oldman: And I kept worrying about it.
1:26:41 Gary Oldman: And then my work was wrapped on GTA 4, but the game wasn’t out yet.
1:26:43 Gary Oldman: And we’ve done a bunch of the marketing stuff.
1:26:45 Gary Oldman: And I had a little window where I wasn’t doing much else.
1:26:49 Gary Oldman: And I took a week with my then girlfriend, now wife,
1:26:52 Gary Oldman: who was heavily pregnant with our first child.
1:26:57 Gary Oldman: And we went up to a house upstate and sat there in the, well,
1:27:00 Gary Oldman: she sat there either cooking for me or watching TV or reading.
1:27:03 Gary Oldman: And I went and sat in the room all day, every day.
1:27:06 Gary Oldman: And just sat there and stared at the computer and tried to think about,
1:27:09 Gary Oldman: How can I do this that it doesn’t sound ridiculous?
1:27:15 Gary Oldman: How can you write in a cowboy idiom that feels both slightly contemporary,
1:27:19 Gary Oldman: but also gives the game this sort of life and this weight that I want it to have
1:27:21 Gary Oldman: and think we can think we can get away with.
1:27:26 Gary Oldman: And after about three days, it just started to come.
1:27:27 Gary Oldman: And then suddenly I wrote about
1:27:29 Gary Oldman: nine, 10 scenes in the next couple of days.
1:27:32 Gary Oldman: And after that knew I had it.
1:27:34 Gary Oldman: And it was, I don’t know if it was that was why there was so much about
1:27:38 Gary Oldman: a character caring about his family,
1:27:41 Gary Oldman: because I was just beginning the process of having a family.
1:27:44 Gary Oldman: Oh, I don’t know to what extent that bled in there,
1:27:46 Gary Oldman: but I think it bled in there to some extent.
1:27:49 Gary Oldman: So that was part of the creating the 360 degree characters.
1:27:50 Gary Oldman: I think so.
1:27:51 Gary Oldman: Here’s this man
1:27:56 Gary Oldman: that is capable, is involved in a lot of violence,
1:27:57 Gary Oldman: who also cares about his family.
1:28:00 Gary Oldman: He’s grown up and he’s trying to step away from that and be,
1:28:02 Gary Oldman: and be a man, be a grown up.
1:28:04 Gary Oldman: And can he get away from it?
1:28:05 Gary Oldman: And then, and then when he can’t get away from it,
1:28:07 Gary Oldman: what’s he willing to do to save his family?
1:28:10 Gary Oldman: And that was, I felt starting to get some idea,
1:28:13 Gary Oldman: feeling just, I mean, she hadn’t given birth yet,
1:28:15 Gary Oldman: but I was beginning to grapple with the ideas of,
1:28:16 Gary Oldman: I’m going to become a parent.
1:28:19 Gary Oldman: So I hope some of that, and obviously,
1:28:21 Gary Oldman: then I didn’t probably write anymore for six months,
1:28:24 Gary Oldman: later on we had a child, but certainly for that first bit,
1:28:26 Gary Oldman: I think some of that began to bleed in there.
1:28:28 Gary Oldman: You got the feeling that you can actually do it.
1:28:34 Gary Oldman: It’s true, it could have very easily been ridiculous
1:28:38 Gary Oldman: and not believable, the dialogue between conboys.
1:28:38 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:28:41 Gary Oldman: I mean, there’s probably so much work went into
1:28:46 Gary Oldman: making it feel real and believable and, and like that,
1:28:55 Gary Oldman: like a Shakespearean type of drama, but not the cheesy kind.
1:28:59 Gary Oldman: Well, just wanted it to feel when they spoke.
1:29:02 Gary Oldman: I mean, I love dialogue.
1:29:05 Gary Oldman: I’m always, you know, I love the sound of words,
1:29:07 Gary Oldman: but just wanted to feel like when they sounded,
1:29:08 Gary Oldman: it didn’t sound cheesy.
1:29:09 Gary Oldman: It didn’t sound ridiculous.
1:29:10 Gary Oldman: You wanted to hear them speak more.
1:29:13 Gary Oldman: It didn’t make you cringe awfully when they spoke.
1:29:15 Gary Oldman: That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was.
1:29:19 Gary Oldman: And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death
1:29:21 Gary Oldman: odyssey, and you cared about him.
1:29:24 Gary Oldman: You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind,
1:29:25 Gary Oldman: even though you didn’t know them.
1:29:28 Gary Oldman: When did you know how you’re going to end Red Dead Redemption one?
1:29:33 Gary Oldman: I remember I did a meeting with, uh, Christian, the designer.
1:29:38 Gary Oldman: I can’t remember what year, probably some point late 2008,
1:29:39 Gary Oldman: early 2009.
1:29:44 Gary Oldman: And we were discussing the last bit and said, I think he’s got to die.
1:29:45 Gary Oldman: And he leapt on the idea.
1:29:46 Gary Oldman: And went, yeah, yes, yes.
1:29:47 Gary Oldman: And then I went, no, it can’t work.
1:29:49 Gary Oldman: Games can’t work like that.
1:29:50 Gary Oldman: They can’t work if he’s dead.
1:29:53 Gary Oldman: And then I began to think through, well, if we just technically,
1:29:55 Gary Oldman: it doesn’t work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff
1:29:57 Gary Oldman: up and then began to think through, actually,
1:29:59 Gary Oldman: I think we can make it work if we do it this way.
1:30:02 Gary Oldman: And so, uh, he then really pushed for that idea.
1:30:06 Gary Oldman: And it seemed to, I was like, I was still torn.
1:30:09 Gary Oldman: I thought it was clever narratively.
1:30:11 Gary Oldman: Um, but I was torn if it was going to work
1:30:15 Gary Oldman: technically as a piece of game design, but I think it did.
1:30:16 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:30:18 Gary Oldman: And, uh, spoiler alert, of course.
1:30:20 Gary Oldman: How do we tell the story of that?
1:30:23 Gary Oldman: Well, so he goes through a lot.
1:30:26 Gary Oldman: He does all the, John does all the dirty work of hunting down his old gang.
1:30:33 Gary Oldman: And he finally is able to go home and be with his family, be on the ranch.
1:30:40 Gary Oldman: And then the government betrays him and sends, uh, uh, troops to kill him.
1:30:43 Gary Oldman: And, and there is dialogue.
1:30:44 Gary Oldman: I mean, that is just, uh,
1:30:51 Gary Oldman: I think the two times I shed a tear in video game history for me
1:30:55 Gary Oldman: is that dialogue.
1:30:57 Gary Oldman: I think John talking to his wife,
1:31:01 Gary Oldman: if I vaguely remember, I think he said, I love you.
1:31:04 Gary Oldman: But he said very, look, he didn’t,
1:31:09 Gary Oldman: he made it seem like he’s going to see her and his son shortly.
1:31:11 Gary Oldman: That dialogue was masterfully done.
1:31:13 Gary Oldman: Like a definition of like less is more.
1:31:16 Gary Oldman: It was just so crisp.
1:31:23 Gary Oldman: That and of course the other one is, um, again, from memory, Arthur riding
1:31:26 Gary Oldman: his horse and the music is playing.
1:31:29 Gary Oldman: It’s very hard not to shed a tear during that.
1:31:34 Gary Oldman: Um, anyway, the dialogue of, uh, John talking to his wife
1:31:40 Gary Oldman: at the end when he’s in a barn and is about to walk out to face certain death.
1:31:43 Gary Oldman: Uh, do you remember writing that?
1:31:44 Gary Oldman: Oh yeah.
1:31:45 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:31:45 Gary Oldman: But it does.
1:31:49 Gary Oldman: Again, I went, I, the actor was so good.
1:31:50 Gary Oldman: And we’ve seen a bunch of his work by then.
1:31:51 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:31:54 Gary Oldman: He had such a good, he was so good at reading those lines that I knew
1:31:57 Gary Oldman: he could give us that you could feel with that point.
1:32:00 Gary Oldman: Like, I think those lines are best when they’re really short and punchy.
1:32:03 Gary Oldman: And so I knew he’d be able to make that line sound good.
1:32:05 Gary Oldman: So you were imagining his voice.
1:32:06 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:32:11 Gary Oldman: And I think all of those actors on, on, on Red Dead Redemption
1:32:14 Gary Oldman: One were so strong that they really brought that game to life.
1:32:18 Gary Oldman: If they, them and Rod, the director and done such a good job, it would have sounded
1:32:19 Gary Oldman: cheesy as hell.
1:32:20 Gary Oldman: Uh, yeah.
1:32:28 Gary Oldman: You’ve said that the ending of that ending, uh, of RDR one is, uh, one of the
1:32:30 Gary Oldman: best things you’ve been a part of creating.
1:32:35 Gary Oldman: Uh, why, why, why is, why is that ending so powerful to you?
1:32:36 Gary Oldman: What does it represent?
1:32:43 Gary Oldman: Um, I think because for the story to work, I mean, just from a, from a technical
1:32:47 Gary Oldman: challenge for the story to work, he had to die.
1:32:51 Gary Oldman: But for a game to work, it felt like a challenge to make him die.
1:32:52 Gary Oldman: It was probably the
1:32:57 Gary Oldman: For fifth or sixth open world game I’d worked on.
1:33:02 Gary Oldman: And I, you know, spent all these years before that working out how these stories worked,
1:33:06 Gary Oldman: how to make them work technically, how to make them feel right, how they interacted
1:33:09 Gary Oldman: with the open form gameplay as best I could.
1:33:13 Gary Oldman: And suddenly we’re going to break one of our golden rules, which was at the end
1:33:17 Gary Oldman: of the game, you’re freeing the character to go and wrap up all the side stories
1:33:18 Gary Oldman: to play forever.
1:33:21 Gary Oldman: We’re not going to be able to do that in this game because the guy’s going to be dead,
1:33:25 Gary Oldman: and we’re going to have to have you play as a different character. And the narrative
1:33:30 Gary Oldman: is going to be, if we’ve done a good job, compelling enough where you’re not going to care
1:33:34 Gary Oldman: about that. Or you’re going to be upset that he’s dead, but you’re going to actually
1:33:39 Gary Oldman: have this emotional moment. So I think it was a big risk from a technical perspective
1:33:43 Gary Oldman: for us to do that. And then it worked. So I think that was something that was very
1:33:49 Gary Oldman: full of fear and it worked out okay. I think people were really upset and angry
1:33:52 Gary Oldman: at us for doing it because anything was going to happen. But I think they also had that
1:33:56 Gary Oldman: kind of experience you’re describing was that kind of creative moment where you know,
1:33:59 Gary Oldman: transcendent moment with characters in a piece of fiction,
1:34:01 Gary Oldman: which is what we’ve always aspired to giving people.
1:34:05 Gary Oldman: I mean, it’s incredible because I don’t think I don’t remember a single video
1:34:06 Gary Oldman: game that has done that before.
1:34:07 Gary Oldman: Well, I would like to have at the end of
1:34:09 Gary Oldman: GTA 4 kill Nico, but you couldn’t do it.
1:34:12 Gary Oldman: You know, the game doesn’t work.
1:34:15 Gary Oldman: So it was this thing where we hadn’t done it, thought about doing it,
1:34:19 Gary Oldman: hadn’t done it, and then going, let’s do it. Let’s take the risk and do it.
1:34:21 Gary Oldman: We can’t do it. Let’s try it. And it worked.
1:34:24 Gary Oldman: Yeah. What about the decision with the son?
1:34:31 Gary Oldman: John give so much effort to make sure that Jack doesn’t end up in a life of violence.
1:34:39 Gary Oldman: I mean, it’s very Godfather-like. He’s dragged back into it through revenge.
1:34:42 Gary Oldman: That was also the game still had to work as a game.
1:34:49 Gary Oldman: Whether that was the right ending, 100% the best ending from a pure storytelling
1:34:54 Gary Oldman: perspective, I don’t know. But I know that we had to make the game work.
1:34:54 Gary Oldman: Interesting.
1:35:00 Gary Oldman: I think it kind of worked in that way where Jack can’t escape. But I always also
1:35:03 Gary Oldman: wanted a version of it where Jack did escape, but that wasn’t, you know,
1:35:06 Gary Oldman: both were interesting to me.
1:35:09 Gary Oldman: Can you just dig in a little deeper? Like, what do you mean about for the game to work?
1:35:13 Gary Oldman: It’s such a direct, it’s like a Kubrick talking about, for this movie to work,
1:35:17 Gary Oldman: it has to have, because from my perspective, I just think about the story.
1:35:19 Gary Oldman: What’s the technical aspect for the game to work?
1:35:26 Gary Oldman: The mechanical experience is you have an avatar, you control, and the games don’t really
1:35:30 Gary Oldman: end, and you have to be able to wander around the world and do stuff. So,
1:35:33 Gary Oldman: At the end of the game, you had to be able to wander around with your
1:35:39 Gary Oldman: fairly limited set of features, which is you can, you know,
1:35:41 Gary Oldman: run up to someone and punch them, or run up to someone and shoot them,
1:35:44 Gary Oldman: run up to someone and rob them, or run up to someone and talk to them.
1:35:49 Gary Oldman: And that’s kind of, you know, jump on a horse or do all this other stuff.
1:35:54 Gary Oldman: In order for the game still to be fun and people to get this full 360 degree experience
1:35:58 Gary Oldman: with it, they had to, you know, 100, if they wanted to 100% the game, as
1:36:02 Gary Oldman: opposed to just finishing the story, you have to have an avatar to do that stuff with.
1:36:07 Gary Oldman: So that was, uh, that was the sort of challenge of, of Jack’s character slash
1:36:08 Gary Oldman: wrapping up the story as Jack.
1:36:15 Gary Oldman: Oh, there’s real power, uh, for the avatar to end, the finiteness.
1:36:18 Gary Oldman: Yeah, both the Red Deadsy obviously change avatar,
1:36:20 Gary Oldman: which we got, you know, and then did it again.
1:36:24 Gary Oldman: I think there’s something interesting about that moment when you change from one
1:36:26 Gary Oldman: character to another because they are you and they’re not you,
1:36:28 Gary Oldman: you know, and then there’s suddenly someone else.
1:36:34 Gary Oldman: I mean, I was really shaken by that experience, but it’s a, it’s a beautiful
1:36:35 Gary Oldman: experience.
1:36:39 Gary Oldman: It’s like an unforgettable experience that what else can video games possibly reach
1:36:43 Gary Oldman: for, you know, that’s the, to create that experience.
1:36:44 Gary Oldman: That’s what great films do.
1:36:46 Gary Oldman: That’s what great, great, great books do.
1:36:48 Gary Oldman: It’s that, I mean, it’s that and the world
1:36:49 Gary Oldman: you’re building in games.
1:36:53 Gary Oldman: I think the experience of being in this fake place and then taken on these
1:36:54 Gary Oldman: narrative adventures.
1:36:57 Gary Oldman: When that combines, you’ve got the amazing experience.
1:37:01 Gary Oldman: So who do you think is the best character you’ve ever created in RDR?
1:37:07 Gary Oldman: So to me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best
1:37:10 Gary Oldman: character ever created in video games ever.
1:37:13 Gary Oldman: I think there’s not even close.
1:37:17 Gary Oldman: I mean, John would be, which is hilarious to say,
1:37:21 Gary Oldman: But like those are, John will be a close second.
1:37:25 Gary Oldman: But Arthur is definitively, and you’ve talked about it in that interview.
1:37:30 Gary Oldman: You said that a lot of video games work on the same premise.
1:37:34 Gary Oldman: That you start as a weak person and end up as a strong superhero.
1:37:37 Gary Oldman: But what if you start as a tough guy?
1:37:39 Gary Oldman: Someone who already is very strong.
1:37:42 Gary Oldman: Someone that is emotionally confident of his place in the world.
1:37:46 Gary Oldman: Arthur’s journey is not about becoming a superhero.
1:37:48 Gary Oldman: Because he’s almost one at the start.
1:37:53 Gary Oldman: But it’s about an intellectual rollercoaster when his worldview gets taken apart.
1:37:55 Gary Oldman: So it’s.
1:38:00 Gary Oldman: It’s very different than the normal journey of a character.
1:38:01 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:38:02 Gary Oldman: In a game.
1:38:02 Gary Oldman: In a game.
1:38:03 Gary Oldman: Wanted to reverse it.
1:38:04 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:38:06 Gary Oldman: So there were a couple other themes that matched that.
1:38:10 Gary Oldman: So there are guys from the Wild West, but they’re being pushed ever further
1:38:11 Gary Oldman: East.
1:38:13 Gary Oldman: So it was almost like an anti-Western and Eastern.
1:38:14 Gary Oldman: You’re traveling East.
1:38:16 Gary Oldman: You’re traveling into civilization.
1:38:17 Gary Oldman: And I don’t think I would have.
1:38:21 Gary Oldman: Been grappling with those ideas.
1:38:23 Gary Oldman: Earlier in my career.
1:38:26 Gary Oldman: Because I was so, you know, this idea of getting.
1:38:30 Gary Oldman: Getting a different kind of strength and different kind of weakness was interesting.
1:38:32 Gary Oldman: What about the component of mortality?
1:38:35 Gary Oldman: Of a character facing his own mortality over a prolonged period.
1:38:37 Gary Oldman: Sort of just realize the.
1:38:39 Gary Oldman: The prospect of.
1:38:42 Gary Oldman: Like real sort of fear of death.
1:38:44 Gary Oldman: Realization of death.
1:38:45 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I thought that was really.
1:38:46 Gary Oldman: Part of the story.
1:38:48 Gary Oldman: Really fun thing to play with.
1:38:51 Gary Oldman: John dies in Red Dead one.
1:38:53 Gary Oldman: And wanted to top that.
1:38:56 Gary Oldman: Red Dead two or do that in a different way.
1:38:58 Gary Oldman: And so the idea that it’s.
1:38:59 Gary Oldman: John’s death is fairly sudden.
1:39:02 Gary Oldman: And so if he’s got this long drawn out death.
1:39:03 Gary Oldman: And then I’d always been.
1:39:05 Gary Oldman: Obsessed by TB.
1:39:07 Gary Oldman: As diseases go, it’s a great literary device.
1:39:10 Gary Oldman: You know, because it is this long drawn out slow death.
1:39:12 Gary Oldman: But in which you are also getting weaker.
1:39:15 Gary Oldman: And my grandfather actually had TB.
1:39:16 Gary Oldman: Before they invented antibiotics.
1:39:18 Gary Oldman: And was sent to a sanatorium.
1:39:20 Gary Oldman: Just after he was.
1:39:21 Gary Oldman: Just after he’d had.
1:39:23 Gary Oldman: His child, my father.
1:39:24 Gary Oldman: And survived.
1:39:26 Gary Oldman: But only three of them out of like 35 survived.
1:39:27 Gary Oldman: So I was always.
1:39:32 Gary Oldman: Captivated by TB as an illness.
1:39:34 Gary Oldman: It felt like it was an interesting thing to.
1:39:37 Gary Oldman: Play around with as an idea.
1:39:39 Gary Oldman: This this guy getting weaker.
1:39:40 Gary Oldman: Who felt like he was immortal.
1:39:41 Gary Oldman: And essentially was immortal.
1:39:43 Gary Oldman: He was the protagonist in a video game.
1:39:44 Gary Oldman: He could not die.
1:39:45 Gary Oldman: And suddenly he is.
1:39:47 Gary Oldman: Becoming mortal.
1:39:49 Gary Oldman: And you know, but that helps him see stuff.
1:39:49 Gary Oldman: I thought that was a.
1:39:52 Gary Oldman: Different way of doing a lead character in a game.
1:39:55 Gary Oldman: Yeah, do you think it’s the.
1:39:56 Gary Oldman: The greatest character we ever created.
1:40:00 Gary Oldman: I think he’s the best lead character.
1:40:03 Gary Oldman: You know, the lead characters are different from the side characters.
1:40:04 Gary Oldman: And I think he’s the.
1:40:05 Gary Oldman: He’s the most.
1:40:09 Gary Oldman: Rounded and works the best.
1:40:11 Gary Oldman: I kind of.
1:40:15 Gary Oldman: Him and Nico are the two I like.
1:40:17 Gary Oldman: They were the two most ambitious.
1:40:17 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:40:18 Gary Oldman: So for me, it’s always.
1:40:22 Gary Oldman: It’s always sort of a toss up, you know, but then I loved all the stuff like the.
1:40:26 Gary Oldman: The the art team did such an amazing job.
1:40:30 Gary Oldman: It was there with the journal and that kind of like the way that all the features
1:40:32 Gary Oldman: worked into Arthur’s character.
1:40:34 Gary Oldman: I thought that was really he really rounded.
1:40:36 Gary Oldman: He worked in a written lots of different ways really well.
1:40:37 Gary Oldman: I loved like.
1:40:40 Gary Oldman: His flawed relationship with his old girlfriend.
1:40:41 Gary Oldman: Things like that all the side,
1:40:43 Gary Oldman: You know, the bits that kind of turned up around him.
1:40:46 Gary Oldman: So you also like the side characters.
1:40:50 Gary Oldman: You like the the flavor of the full cast.
1:40:52 Gary Oldman: What are some of the favorites you’ve created?
1:40:54 Gary Oldman: I’m sure the one you’re currently working on.
1:40:54 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:40:56 Gary Oldman: That’s if you call them a side character.
1:40:58 Gary Oldman: Well, he’s not a protagonist.
1:41:00 Gary Oldman: He’s like he’s a God, not a character.
1:41:01 Gary Oldman: Sure.
1:41:02 Gary Oldman: So he’s not him.
1:41:03 Gary Oldman: I’m enjoying.
1:41:05 Gary Oldman: I love Dutch.
1:41:06 Gary Oldman: Mm hmm.
1:41:13 Gary Oldman: You know, it was partly because we wrote a few lines for him for the first game.
1:41:18 Gary Oldman: And the actor did such a such an amazing job that when he spoke,
1:41:20 Gary Oldman: it just came to me all of their backstory,
1:41:23 Gary Oldman: which I’ve been playing around with by that point anywhere a little bit in my head,
1:41:25 Gary Oldman: but I knew it was this bigger gang stuff.
1:41:27 Gary Oldman: And then I sort of saw exactly who he was.
1:41:31 Gary Oldman: And so that was that that felt like he felt like a living character to me.
1:41:36 Gary Oldman: And we should say that Dutch is kind of like maybe a little bit of a godlike figure.
1:41:36 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:41:39 Gary Oldman: In both of the Red Dead Redemption games.
1:41:40 Gary Oldman: And he’s the leader of the gang.
1:41:46 Gary Oldman: And there’s a father son relationship with Dutch with the I mean with Arthur with John.
1:41:51 Gary Oldman: I mean, there’s there’s a family feeling to the gang that you explore all those dynamics.
1:41:55 Gary Oldman: And then the feeling of betrayal and Arthur facing tuberculosis.
1:42:01 Gary Oldman: You’re going against the family going against the father because he is transforming his
1:42:05 Gary Oldman: sense of the world of morality of all those kinds of things.
1:42:08 Gary Oldman: So all the kind of very Shakespearean dramas right there.
1:42:15 Gary Oldman: And Dutch is a prominent godlike figure through all of that also flawed himself.
1:42:21 Gary Oldman: Also a man of good and evil in that framework that they’re operating under.
1:42:24 Gary Oldman: He’s just drowning in his ego at the end.
1:42:24 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:42:26 Gary Oldman: You know, his ego gets the better of him.
1:42:28 Gary Oldman: I think he’s a buddy, but there was something
1:42:33 Gary Oldman: flawed but beautiful in his idealism when he was younger.
1:42:35 Gary Oldman: And that’s mostly off camera.
1:42:39 Gary Oldman: But and then you saw, you know, always been as an individual.
1:42:43 Gary Oldman: I’ve always been very susceptible to charming people and he’s charming.
1:42:47 Gary Oldman: And so I always kind of I can see how people get captivated by charming people.
1:42:52 Gary Oldman: And the idea of here was a very charming person and the roads run out for him.
1:42:59 Gary Oldman: I personally am afraid of how much I love human beings and how susceptible I am
1:43:01 Gary Oldman: To charm and charisma.
1:43:02 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:43:05 Gary Oldman: Because it can cloud your judgment about human nature.
1:43:06 Gary Oldman: Completely.
1:43:08 Gary Oldman: And that’s what he that’s what’s happened with him.
1:43:11 Gary Oldman: And it ended up clouding his judgment about himself.
1:43:13 Gary Oldman: He kind of fell for his own rubbish.
1:43:15 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:43:17 Gary Oldman: But also it clouded Arthur’s judgment.
1:43:18 Gary Oldman: Oh, completely.
1:43:22 Gary Oldman: Arthur was completely, you know, platonically in love with him.
1:43:23 Gary Oldman: He was worshiping him.
1:43:24 Gary Oldman: He’d given up his power to him.
1:43:31 Gary Oldman: And then I think part of the journey is retaking that power in the moment of dying.
1:43:34 Gary Oldman: You know, that’s what that’s what I thought was really interesting.
1:43:37 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it’s truly tragic for Arthur to be
1:43:45 Gary Oldman: Losing his identity, lifelong identity, and the sense of belonging and losing his life at
1:43:53 the same time. In facing the mortality, he is realizing that he’s not, all of it has been a lie.
1:43:57 Gary Oldman: But he gets to do some, well, it depends on what the choices you make.
1:43:58 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:44:00 Gary Oldman: But he gets to do some good.
1:44:01 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:44:03 Gary Oldman: And so he, you know, he gets his moment of redemption.
1:44:09 Gary Oldman: Just a little bit, but realizing your whole life, you’ve been living not a good life.
1:44:09 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:44:11 Gary Oldman: You’ve been not a good man.
1:44:12 Gary Oldman: Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of?
1:44:15 Gary Oldman: I guess it’s never too late to change your ways.
1:44:15 Gary Oldman: I hope not.
1:44:17 Gary Oldman: I hope not.
1:44:19 Gary Oldman: So the biggest, most important question,
1:44:24 Gary Oldman: primary, central to the reason we’re talking today,
1:44:27 Gary Oldman: the number one question from the internet,
1:44:29 Gary Oldman: it is so ridiculous, but I must ask,
1:44:31 Gary Oldman: have you seen Gavin?
1:44:35 Gary Oldman: Who is Gavin?
1:44:39 Gary Oldman: So for more context, there’s a guy named Nigel in Red Dead Redemption 2,
1:44:43 Gary Oldman: who’s frantically searching for a mystery man named Gavin throughout the game.
1:44:47 Gary Oldman: This has become one of the biggest mysteries amongst the interwebs,
1:44:49 Gary Oldman: the RDR fan base.
1:44:50 Gary Oldman: So the theories include,
1:44:53 Gary Oldman: Theory one is it’s a split personality disorder.
1:44:56 Gary Oldman: Nigel himself is Gavin.
1:45:03 Gary Oldman: So the evidence is the letter for this theory that has some evidence that maybe
1:45:07 Gary Oldman: due to trauma, the split personality disorder was created.
1:45:09 Gary Oldman: Gavin was created inside Nigel’s mind.
1:45:13 Gary Oldman: Theory two is Gavin is dead and Nigel is simply in denial.
1:45:18 Gary Oldman: Theory three is that it’s just a troll and
1:45:22 Gary Oldman: a rock star intentionally created an unsolvable mystery to drive players crazy.
1:45:26 Gary Oldman: I also heard theory four is Gavin is the strange man.
1:45:29 Gary Oldman: So there’s this fascinating character, the strange man,
1:45:36 Gary Oldman: this supernatural character that has a presence in RDR one and a little bit in RDR two also.
1:45:37 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:45:41 Gary Oldman: So, uh, which, which theory is closest to the truth?
1:45:47 Gary Oldman: Not three or four somewhere in my mind, somewhere between one and two.
1:45:48 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:45:51 Gary Oldman: I just love the way he shouted Gavin.
1:45:52 Gary Oldman: It just amused me.
1:45:56 Gary Oldman: So at some level, it probably is trolling and that we didn’t want it to be a
1:45:57 Gary Oldman: totally clear mystery.
1:46:00 Gary Oldman: You wanted it to have a little bit of adventure to it.
1:46:08 Gary Oldman: Um, but it was meant to be without ever fully being explained that Gavin’s not there
1:46:08 Gary Oldman: anymore.
1:46:10 Gary Oldman: Gavin’s either gone home.
1:46:11 Gary Oldman: Gavin’s left him.
1:46:15 Gary Oldman: Gavin’s, uh, and we were going to keep exploring that idea.
1:46:17 Gary Oldman: He was going to reappear in some way or other.
1:46:21 Gary Oldman: Did you have any idea how much, uh,
1:46:28 Gary Oldman: imagination, excitement and curiosity that little interaction would inspire in people?
1:46:29 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:46:30 Gary Oldman: And no.
1:46:34 Gary Oldman: I mean, no, you can never know what people are going to find amusing in these big games.
1:46:35 Gary Oldman: And a lot of it comes down to acting as well.
1:46:37 Gary Oldman: The guy was just funny when he said Gavin.
1:46:38 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:46:38 Gary Oldman: It was just funny.
1:46:39 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:46:43 Gary Oldman: You know, but there was a ped in Red Red Dimension 1 that everyone was obsessed by.
1:46:45 Gary Oldman: And I really wasn’t expecting that.
1:46:47 Gary Oldman: So we try and put a few characters in.
1:46:49 Gary Oldman: I mean, Gavin was supposed to be amusing.
1:46:50 Gary Oldman: I thought he was amusing.
1:46:53 Gary Oldman: Um, but you never know what’s what people are going to get obsessed by.
1:46:56 Gary Oldman: There are the characters I think are funny and the people don’t even notice them.
1:46:59 Gary Oldman: You know, although they see them in a completely different way.
1:47:00 Gary Oldman: Did you have a part in writing the letter?
1:47:01 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:47:06 Gary Oldman: I can’t remember if I wrote it or I either I wrote it or Mike wrote it or we both
1:47:06 Gary Oldman: wrote it.
1:47:08 Gary Oldman: I really can’t remember, to be honest with you.
1:47:09 Gary Oldman: But yeah, I certainly would have edited it.
1:47:11 Gary Oldman: And Mike might have written it or I might have written it.
1:47:12 Gary Oldman: I really can’t remember.
1:47:15 Gary Oldman: It’s so fascinating because that little piece of writing,
1:47:19 Gary Oldman: of course, you have thousands of pages, that little piece of writing gets like
1:47:20 Gary Oldman: analyzed.
1:47:22 Gary Oldman: Oh, but we certainly talked about it in depth.
1:47:25 Gary Oldman: And, uh, if Mike was here, I’d ask you, he might remember.
1:47:28 Gary Oldman: I can’t mean to ever do so much of those things.
1:47:32 Gary Oldman: And I loved the use of letters in Red Dead to tell all these weird backstories.
1:47:37 Gary Oldman: And some became very clear and some were still a little kind of opaque.
1:47:40 Gary Oldman: But the general vibe was there was no Gavin.
1:47:42 Gary Oldman: Either there was no Gavin or he’d long since left.
1:47:45 Gary Oldman: So it’s kind of a split personality, you know,
1:47:49 Gary Oldman: And then we were going to over subsequent games that provide more information.
1:47:52 Gary Oldman: So in some sense, you yourself don’t quite know.
1:47:54 Gary Oldman: You kind of have an idea.
1:47:58 Gary Oldman: So he could like, like which way do you lean more theory one or two?
1:48:01 Gary Oldman: Is he dead in the guy and Nigel’s in denial?
1:48:04 Gary Oldman: Or is there real communication going inside his head?
1:48:06 Gary Oldman: No, Gavin existed.
1:48:08 Gary Oldman: So it wasn’t that he was a split personality.
1:48:13 Gary Oldman: And the only thing we hadn’t really decided was in a future game, were we going
1:48:15 to reveal that Gavin was dead?
1:48:18 Gary Oldman: Or was Gavin going to turn up having long since abandoned this maniac?
1:48:21 Gary Oldman: You know, that was what we’re still playing around with.
1:48:23 Gary Oldman: I think the idea was that he was never going to meet.
1:48:25 Gary Oldman: He was never going to meet Gavin in this game.
1:48:27 Gary Oldman:
1:48:31 Gary Oldman: It’s just, it’s just fascinating because you have to think about all of that.
1:48:32 Gary Oldman: You have to write all of that.
1:48:34 Gary Oldman: You have to have those discussions.
1:48:34 Gary Oldman: You have to have those debates.
1:48:36 Gary Oldman: And it has to feel fresh.
1:48:41 Gary Oldman: That was what we’ve done before, constantly looking as you do, you know, I think
1:48:45 I did, you know, somewhere between 15 and 20 of these games got to do stuff that’s new.
1:48:47 Gary Oldman: It can’t repeat itself too much.
1:48:52 Gary Oldman: I mean, we also live in the age of the internet, just like you realize there’s
1:48:58 like millions of people worrying about where and who Gavin is.
1:48:59 Gary Oldman: Thank God.
1:49:04 Gary Oldman: It’s like, it’s fascinating that they’re having is they think about people
1:49:07 Gary Oldman: reading like James Joyce or something and thinking about the care,
1:49:12 Gary Oldman: like breaking apart Ulysses and thinking about like arguing about different
1:49:13 Gary Oldman: interpretations of it.
1:49:16 Gary Oldman: And to me that in itself is also beautiful.
1:49:17 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:49:21 Gary Oldman: We want the side mysteries to be solvable up to a point, but you still want,
1:49:22 Gary Oldman: you want these discussions.
1:49:22 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:49:25 Gary Oldman: You know, and you want, but as long as it feels
1:49:27 Gary Oldman: totally appropriate for this whole big sort of
1:49:32 Gary Oldman: shaggy dog story experience you’re making, which Gavin was just about, and he
1:49:33 Gary Oldman: was so weird.
1:49:37 Gary Oldman: And he just was intrinsically of just something funny about an English person
1:49:38 Gary Oldman: screaming Gavin.
1:49:38 Gary Oldman: I don’t know why.
1:49:39 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:49:40 Gary Oldman: Some of that humor.
1:49:43 Gary Oldman: I mean, there’s that there, there’s certainly in Red Dead Redemption,
1:49:47 Gary Oldman: that’s humor, but there’s a lot of in Grand Theft Auto and what it’s
1:49:53 Gary Oldman: it’s hard to put into words why that’s funny, why it becomes mean, why it becomes
1:49:55 Gary Oldman: viral, because it’s just funny.
1:49:59 Gary Oldman: I know why I think it’s funny, but what you can’t, what I’m not good at doing
1:50:03 Gary Oldman: at least is going, this thing will become really popular online and this other
1:50:04 Gary Oldman: thing won’t.
1:50:05 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:10 Gary Oldman: You can create this bunch of 50 different side things that people might get
1:50:13 Gary Oldman: captivated by and you just do not know what they’re going to respond to.
1:50:15 Gary Oldman: How do you know when something’s funny?
1:50:16 Gary Oldman: You just feel it.
1:50:17 Gary Oldman: I know what I think is funny.
1:50:19 Gary Oldman: You just giggle it at yourself.
1:50:20 Gary Oldman: Just because it’s ridiculous as well.
1:50:24 Gary Oldman: That was just, there’s nothing funny about a dude shouting Gavin a lot.
1:50:25 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:27 Gary Oldman: He just said it, I just thought it might be funny.
1:50:29 Gary Oldman: And he just said it in such a funny way.
1:50:29 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:30 Gary Oldman: And then it just became funny.
1:50:35 Gary Oldman: Like you, we often have those side characters and they’re not that funny.
1:50:36 Gary Oldman: And I think they’re going to be hysterical.
1:50:38 Gary Oldman: And then you put them in the game and they’re off.
1:50:39 Gary Oldman: They’re fine, but they’re not amazing.
1:50:40 Gary Oldman: That guy just brought that stuff to life.
1:50:41 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:43 Gary Oldman: And there’s a backstory too.
1:50:44 Gary Oldman: I mean, Londoner and not.
1:50:45 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:48 Gary Oldman: That was what, you know, just there’s something sometimes fun.
1:50:51 Gary Oldman: An English person saying the name Gavin is quite funny.
1:50:52 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:50:52 Gary Oldman: I don’t know why.
1:50:55 Gary Oldman: So about the strange man, AKA the man in black.
1:50:59 Gary Oldman: Is there some element with Michael and the therapist in Grand Theft Auto 5?
1:51:01 Gary Oldman: Like who is the strange man?
1:51:07 Gary Oldman: Well, the strange man was again, was someone we came up with quickly.
1:51:13 Gary Oldman: We made Red Dead 1 and we were making Red Dead 1.
1:51:18 Gary Oldman: And we’d made this, we felt quite compelling story and quite interesting open
1:51:19 world.
1:51:23 Gary Oldman: But, and we would, we’d already made a bunch of Grand Theft Autos, obviously.
1:51:26 Gary Oldman: But unfortunately we’d taken out the machine guns because it was a cowboy game,
1:51:28 Gary Oldman: apart from the big fixed position ones.
1:51:31 Gary Oldman: And we’d taken out the cars and we’d taken out the city and large numbers
1:51:32 Gary Oldman: of pedestrians.
1:51:36 Gary Oldman: So you essentially had a game about a dude riding a horse around the desert.
1:51:39 Gary Oldman: And it was quite, and it was quite boring.
1:51:41 Gary Oldman: And so we were, we then started filling it with content
1:51:44 Gary Oldman: And we filled it with these and having to improvise.
1:51:47 Gary Oldman: And we filled it with these things we call random events that would be the sort
1:51:50 of mocap moments that you could interact with.
1:51:53 Gary Oldman: And it was, they were, they were, the designers did an amazing job of those.
1:51:54 Gary Oldman: They were really fun.
1:51:56 Gary Oldman: But there was not enough of them.
1:51:59 Gary Oldman: And then we felt we needed more story because the story was perhaps a little short.
1:52:05 Gary Oldman: So we kind of quite late in development started putting in almost like these RPG type
1:52:07 Gary Oldman: content where you go and meet someone.
1:52:09 Gary Oldman: And that way we thought of them was they were like short stories.
1:52:14 Gary Oldman: So you go and meet someone, they’d set you a slow problem, like go and collect me 15
1:52:15 Gary Oldman: bunches of flowers.
1:52:18 Gary Oldman: And when you came, came back, it would resolve your story.
1:52:20 Gary Oldman: And so the one would go, go get them for my bride.
1:52:21 Gary Oldman: You come back and the bride’s dead.
1:52:26 Gary Oldman: You know, we tried to make them like these short stories with a stinging
1:52:33 Gary Oldman: And he came out as I was trying to come up with ideas for those as just this
1:52:34 Gary Oldman: weird character.
1:52:38 Gary Oldman: And then we built him a bit into the story where he would unlock as you worked
1:52:42 Gary Oldman: your way through and be a commentary on what you were doing.
1:52:44 Gary Oldman: So he was meant to be a kind of
1:52:52 Gary Oldman: Manifestation of your, you know, shadow, your karma, the devil, somewhere,
1:52:54 Gary Oldman: you know, just saw the world.
1:52:57 Gary Oldman: And then we built out his backstory over time.
1:53:01 Gary Oldman: And decide, you know, and so in Red Dead 2, you could interact with him again
1:53:03 Gary Oldman: and or not really interact with him.
1:53:07 Gary Oldman: But he was there and he was meant to be, you know, something I suppose any creative
1:53:10 Gary Oldman: is scared of an artist who’s kind of sold his soul to the devil.
1:53:13 Gary Oldman: And that slowly revealed itself.
1:53:19 Gary Oldman: There is a connection between the main character and the, is it like a Jungian shadow
1:53:20 Gary Oldman: type of situation?
1:53:22 Gary Oldman: Well, it’s sort of because he knows what you’re up to.
1:53:27 Gary Oldman: The connection is, and what’s never really made clear is, does he know this about
1:53:27 Gary Oldman: everybody?
1:53:29 Gary Oldman: Like, is he following you?
1:53:35 Gary Oldman: Or is he able, because of the pact he’s made with evil forces, able to do this for everybody?
1:53:37 Gary Oldman: And I don’t think we necessarily ever clarify that.
1:53:38 Gary Oldman: He’s certainly able to do it for you.
1:53:42 Gary Oldman: I mean, there’s the narrative wise, there’s techniques to
1:53:49 Gary Oldman: reveal a kind of self-reflection analysis of the main character’s thoughts.
1:53:51 Gary Oldman: I mean, that’s why I brought up the therapist with Michael.
1:53:56 Gary Oldman: That was a really powerful, interesting thing to do in the video game.
1:53:58 Gary Oldman: I don’t think I’ve seen that.
1:53:59 Gary Oldman: That’s such a cool.
1:54:01 Gary Oldman: I mean, there’s a Sopranos element there with a therapist.
1:54:02 Gary Oldman: A little bit.
1:54:02 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:54:07 Gary Oldman: I really love an opportunity for a character to just
1:54:09 Gary Oldman: self-reflect through that technique.
1:54:11 Gary Oldman: But it also changed depending on what you’ve done.
1:54:12 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:54:15 Gary Oldman: So it was, it was sort of slightly, it wasn’t as interactive as it could be,
1:54:18 Gary Oldman: but it was slightly interactive or slightly responsive to what you’ve done.
1:54:23 Gary Oldman: So I felt it was still valid video game content because it was living up to a point.
1:54:27 Gary Oldman: And I just thought the character, Dr. Friedlander was just funny because he was awful.
1:54:29 Gary Oldman: So it was like LA, you’re in therapy.
1:54:33 Gary Oldman: It’s very LA, but it’s also very LA, he wants to write a book and betray you.
1:54:33 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:54:35 Gary Oldman: Which felt like a good, a good twist.
1:54:37 Gary Oldman: And it was, he felt like a grand theft auto therapist.
1:54:45 Gary Oldman: But just like the idea of making the player in a game and games are intrinsically
1:54:50 Gary Oldman: kind of physical and you know, you, you walk, you, you punch things, you run around,
1:54:54 Gary Oldman: you drive cars, you shoot people, whatever these, these kinds of physical fantasies,
1:54:58 Gary Oldman: trying to put them into a slightly more reflective or metaphysical state for a moment,
1:54:59 Gary Oldman: I think can be really fun.
1:55:03 Gary Oldman: I think to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption,
1:55:09 Gary Oldman: about video games that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is
1:55:15 Gary Oldman: insanely specific intricate details in the story, but also visually.
1:55:22 Gary Oldman: It’s just added to the, the feeling, uh, that the world is real.
1:55:25 Gary Oldman: Uh, so I have to ask what, what are some of your, um,
1:55:32 Gary Oldman: favorite insanely specific intricate details in, in RDR and give you some options.
1:55:35 Gary Oldman: Uh, internet’s favorite is horse testicles shrinking in cold weather.
1:55:39 Gary Oldman: Those guys did an amazing job on that.
1:55:39 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:55:43 Gary Oldman: I mean, I just, and there must’ve been a meeting and there must have been engineers
1:55:46 Gary Oldman: and, and graphics designers.
1:55:47 Gary Oldman: Just artists.
1:55:48 Gary Oldman: Artists.
1:55:49 Gary Oldman: I think, I don’t think it was that hard.
1:55:51 Gary Oldman: Okay.
1:55:54 Gary Oldman: Uh, thank you.
1:55:55 Gary Oldman: Thank you for that.
1:55:58 Gary Oldman: Arthur’s hair and beard grow in real time.
1:55:59 Gary Oldman: Mm-hmm.
1:56:01 Gary Oldman: So gun maintenance matters.
1:56:03 Gary Oldman: Firearms get dirty and perform worse over time.
1:56:06 Gary Oldman: Uh, animal carcasses decompose realistically.
1:56:08 Gary Oldman: They feel like they do.
1:56:12 Gary Oldman: That’s still extremely rare in video games that the temporal aspect.
1:56:12 Gary Oldman: Yes.
1:56:15 Gary Oldman: That permeates through time, you know, NPCs remembering you.
1:56:18 Gary Oldman: That’s the best.
1:56:19 Gary Oldman: I mean, that’s the thing I love it.
1:56:23 Gary Oldman: Playing around with a lot of stuff in the new games around that.
1:56:24 Gary Oldman: I think it’s super interesting.
1:56:25 Gary Oldman: It’s really powerful.
1:56:26 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:56:27 Gary Oldman: Really interesting.
1:56:32 Gary Oldman: I think the, the, it just, it’s a really fun way of giving you kind of narrative
1:56:35 content that is also systemic and procedural.
1:56:36 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:56:41 Gary Oldman: Is it technically really difficult to do for, for the game, for the game to feel
1:56:42 like it remembers you?
1:56:47 Gary Oldman: Um, I think with modern tech, it’s not that hard, but there’s a lot of stuff you
1:56:49 Gary Oldman: You need to track to make it interesting.
1:56:50 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:56:50 Gary Oldman: To have a memory.
1:56:52 Gary Oldman: So that’s really powerful.
1:56:53 Gary Oldman: Uh, the mud physics.
1:56:56 Gary Oldman: Uh, so Arthur’s boots get muddy and leave actual tracks.
1:56:57 Gary Oldman: I mean, that’s just incredible.
1:56:59 Gary Oldman: Really, really incredible.
1:57:01 Gary Oldman: You know, we made a dusty game.
1:57:02 Gary Oldman: Red Dead 1 is a super dusty game.
1:57:04 Gary Oldman: Make, you know, the problem with
1:57:09 Gary Oldman: Cowboys is that if you’ve tried to make a greatest hits of the cowboy game,
1:57:12 Gary Oldman: and then you’ve got to make a sequel, you’ve got to come up with different geographies.
1:57:14 Gary Oldman: So that’s why the game starts in the snow.
1:57:17 Gary Oldman: So we wanted a game that had snow and mud because those were things you hadn’t really
1:57:19 Gary Oldman: seen in Red Dead 1.
1:57:21 Gary Oldman: And then the challenge is how do you make mud good in the game?
1:57:23 Gary Oldman: And the guys did an amazing job.
1:57:28 Gary Oldman: I mean, this, the snowstorm that starts the game, RDR 2.
1:57:32 Gary Oldman: I don’t remember the last time I’ve experienced anything like it, but you felt it.
1:57:34 Gary Oldman: I don’t know how the hell you do that.
1:57:36 Gary Oldman: It’s not just graphics.
1:57:37 Gary Oldman: It’s everything, everything together.
1:57:40 Gary Oldman: I suppose some of the, the dialogue is really important.
1:57:41 Gary Oldman: It’s the acting.
1:57:42 Gary Oldman: They feel, they feel.
1:57:43 Gary Oldman: Yeah, that’s right.
1:57:44 Gary Oldman: And they feel desperate.
1:57:46 Gary Oldman: That was that feeling of sort of exodus.
1:57:50 Gary Oldman: Like you’re running away from something that gives the game sort of energy at the start.
1:57:51 Gary Oldman: And it was at night.
1:57:52 Gary Oldman: Oh man, it was just.
1:57:53 Gary Oldman: And there was a big group of them.
1:57:55 Gary Oldman: The other, you know, first game started off as a lone wolf.
1:57:57 Gary Oldman: Suddenly you’re in this big group.
1:57:58 Gary Oldman: So it felt very different.
1:58:01 Gary Oldman: In Arthur’s body, bullet wounds persist.
1:58:04 Gary Oldman: So that, that temporal consistency, that’s really important.
1:58:07 Gary Oldman: And underweight Arthur looks gone and overweight.
1:58:11 Gary Oldman: Arthur gets a gut and fuller face.
1:58:14 Gary Oldman: Again, those like decisions that you make.
1:58:18 Gary Oldman: Reveal themselves in the game across time and they’re consistent.
1:58:20 Gary Oldman: I don’t know.
1:58:21 Gary Oldman: I did not see many games do that.
1:58:23 Gary Oldman: This must be difficult to do.
1:58:29 Gary Oldman: But to give that level of care to the details in that way across time.
1:58:33 Gary Oldman: And for specific graphical representations of things is incredible.
1:58:34 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:58:35 Gary Oldman: Do you have favorites?
1:58:39 Gary Oldman: Where you were first, like, this is, this is amazing.
1:58:41 Gary Oldman: I think all of it, I think the way the whole,
1:58:45 Gary Oldman: To me, the thing that I would care about most was the way the whole thing sat together.
1:58:47 Gary Oldman: You know, the fact that each of those,
1:58:51 Gary Oldman: they all feel like they belong together with each other.
1:58:55 Gary Oldman: You made this cohesive, very, you know, quote unquote,
1:58:58 Gary Oldman: realistic for a video game experience.
1:58:59 Gary Oldman: And all the details feel like they mesh.
1:59:03 Gary Oldman: Well, for me, everything about the horse, a lot of people.
1:59:05 Gary Oldman: Now testicle shrinking included.
1:59:09 Gary Oldman: What’s the process of deciding this?
1:59:11 Gary Oldman: The internet seems to really care about,
1:59:13 Gary Oldman: I mean, they love the game so much.
1:59:15 Gary Oldman: So they want to know if anything was cut.
1:59:18 Gary Oldman: And I’m sure stuff was cut because you, you have to choose.
1:59:19 Gary Oldman: Mm-hmm.
1:59:21 Gary Oldman: What’s the process of deciding what to cut?
1:59:22 Gary Oldman: What the cut scenes like?
1:59:28 Gary Oldman: Is there any scenes that you had to let go of that you really miss?
1:59:33 Gary Oldman: I wish you could have done in either GTA or RDR.
1:59:36 Gary Oldman: Well, I think the games ended up the way they were supposed to be.
1:59:37 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
1:59:45 Gary Oldman: You know, I think there was always, there was a bit at the start of RDR where he’d
1:59:51 Gary Oldman: had a baby who just died in Red Dead 2 and we ended up cutting it, which was the right
1:59:51 Gary Oldman: decision.
1:59:58 Gary Oldman: It was too tough in some ways, but I think it gave him real and he was not very sympathetic
2:00:01 Gary Oldman: to his occasional girlfriend who’d had the baby.
2:00:05 Gary Oldman: And so it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting
2:00:10 Gary Oldman: to play around with, because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting.
2:00:12 Gary Oldman: Like he was not a likable character at the start.
2:00:15 Gary Oldman: And that was one, and we ended up making him slightly more like, he’s still sort of tough
2:00:18 Gary Oldman: and nasty, but he’s slightly more likable early on.
2:00:21 Gary Oldman: That was the right decision commercially.
2:00:22 Gary Oldman: It’s better that way.
2:00:25 Gary Oldman: But I don’t, you know, but I still, I like that little bit.
2:00:27 Gary Oldman: Um, it spoke to me personally.
2:00:33 Gary Oldman: Um, there, and just his inability to access his emotions, I thought was really
2:00:36 Gary Oldman: strong, because then later in the game he’s getting very emotional.
2:00:38 Gary Oldman: But there’s also always little bits and pieces that get
2:00:43 Gary Oldman: trimmed, you know, and, um, and don’t, well, missions that just are not going
2:00:44 Gary Oldman: to work technically.
2:00:46 Gary Oldman: Usually it’s like this mission is not going to work technically.
2:00:49 Gary Oldman: Oh God, we’ve got to cut it.
2:00:51 Gary Oldman: Okay, how do we glue the story back together?
2:00:55 Gary Oldman: And we got better over time at gluing the story across missing chunks.
2:00:57 Gary Oldman: You get late in the game and it’s just
2:00:58 Gary Oldman: something, you know, some big challenging
2:01:00 Gary Oldman: moment just is going to look rubbish.
2:01:01 Gary Oldman: So you just get rid of it.
2:01:02 Gary Oldman: I think editing,
2:01:06 Gary Oldman: Editing film, and I imagine editing video games,
2:01:11 Gary Oldman: Editing down is, is an art form, but it’s also just,
2:01:14 Gary Oldman: it feels like torture because you’re letting go
2:01:17 Gary Oldman: of things you put so much love into.
2:01:19 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it could be changes.
2:01:21 Gary Oldman: You know, if you fall in love with something and everyone else
2:01:21 Gary Oldman: goes, let’s change it.
2:01:24 Gary Oldman: That could be, of course, that would be upsetting in some ways.
2:01:25 Gary Oldman: Otherwise you didn’t care about it.
2:01:26 Gary Oldman: But you know, if I was
2:01:29 Gary Oldman: over involved in the big creative thing, and he goes,
2:01:30 Gary Oldman: Okay, it’s the right decision.
2:01:32 Gary Oldman: I can probably live with that fine.
2:01:34 Gary Oldman: I think sometimes for designers, when they’re only
2:01:36 Gary Oldman: designing four or five missions in the whole game,
2:01:39 Gary Oldman: and two of them get cut, that must be really, really hard.
2:01:43 Gary Oldman: Is there DLCs like for RDR,
2:01:47 Gary Oldman: GTA that you wish you had the time when you were there to have created?
2:01:48 Gary Oldman: Of course.
2:01:50 Gary Oldman: There’s always things I wish I’d done.
2:01:51 Gary Oldman: I always wish I’d done more.
2:01:53 Gary Oldman: What would you have added?
2:01:55 Gary Oldman: This is a fun like nerding out.
2:01:58 Gary Oldman: The internet knows we made a DLC,
2:02:00 Gary Oldman: single player DLC for GTA 5 that never came out.
2:02:04 Gary Oldman: And we’ve also never really worked on another game.
2:02:07 Gary Oldman: But I like the idea of it that was a GTA zombie game.
2:02:09 Gary Oldman: That would have been funny.
2:02:10 Gary Oldman: I think that could have been quite fun.
2:02:12 Gary Oldman: What was the GTA 5 DLC?
2:02:14 Gary Oldman: It was one when you played as Trevor,
2:02:15 Gary Oldman: But he was a secret agent.
2:02:16 Gary Oldman: Oh.
2:02:17 Gary Oldman: It was cute.
2:02:20 Gary Oldman: It never quite came together and it was never finished.
2:02:22 Gary Oldman: It was about half done when it got abandoned.
2:02:23 Gary Oldman: But I think if that had come out,
2:02:25 Gary Oldman: probably wouldn’t have got to make Red Dead 2.
2:02:27 Gary Oldman: So there’s always compromises.
2:02:30 Gary Oldman: But I like making the stories.
2:02:33 Gary Oldman: For me, I love the model of GTA 4,
2:02:35 Gary Oldman: when you had the extra stories coming afterwards.
2:02:36 Gary Oldman: Or Red Dead 1,
2:02:38 Gary Oldman: when you had the zombie pack coming afterwards.
2:02:40 Gary Oldman: I like just doing these extra things.
2:02:42 Gary Oldman: So I would personally like
2:02:46 Gary Oldman: to have done more of that in that company.
2:02:48 Gary Oldman: And with stuff we’re doing in the future,
2:02:51 Gary Oldman: we’re going to try and come up with worlds
2:02:53 Gary Oldman: where we can add more stories.
2:02:54 Gary Oldman: I like single-player DLC.
2:02:55 Gary Oldman: I just think the audience loves it
2:02:56 Gary Oldman: and it’s really fun to make.
2:02:58 Gary Oldman: Does it make it a little bit sad
2:03:00 Gary Oldman: that the gaming industry in general
2:03:03 Gary Oldman: is moving towards more online,
2:03:05 Gary Oldman: less single-player DLC?
2:03:07 Gary Oldman: Maybe that observation isn’t correct,
2:03:08 Gary Oldman: but it feels…
2:03:10 Gary Oldman: At this moment to me, it feels like
2:03:15 Gary Oldman: it’s easier to make a lot of money with online.
2:03:16 Gary Oldman: If you get it right.
2:03:17 Gary Oldman: If you get it right.
2:03:19 Gary Oldman: And so the gaming companies are reaching for that.
2:03:22 Gary Oldman: And it just makes me really sad
2:03:24 Gary Oldman: because there’s so much power to the…
2:03:26 Gary Oldman: What you did with Red Dead Redemption 2,
2:03:28 Gary Oldman: I don’t know how during that time
2:03:29 Gary Oldman: you were able to pull that off,
2:03:32 Gary Oldman: but that was like a breath of fresh air,
2:03:34 Gary Oldman: or in a time where everybody was moving to online,
2:03:36 Gary Oldman: and there was that huge incentive to that.
2:03:39 Gary Oldman: You go on and drop, again,
2:03:41 Gary Oldman: the greatest narrative in video game history,
2:03:43 Gary Oldman: and the greatest character in video game history.
2:03:44 Gary Oldman: Single-player.
2:03:46 Gary Oldman: We still love single-player games.
2:03:50 Gary Oldman: And I think as we started up absurd,
2:03:51 Gary Oldman: we did a lot of soul-searching.
2:03:52 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:03:55 Gary Oldman: And then also a lot of cynical,
2:03:58 Gary Oldman: looking at what goes well in the industry.
2:04:00 Gary Oldman: Luckily, if you want to do what we’re forced to do,
2:04:02 Gary Oldman: and also what I want to do, which is make new IP,
2:04:04 Gary Oldman: you need single-player games.
2:04:09 Gary Oldman: You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP.
2:04:11 Gary Oldman: It’s just extremely hard.
2:04:14 Gary Oldman: So luckily, we are focusing on what we’re good at,
2:04:16 Gary Oldman: which is open-world single-player games.
2:04:17 Gary Oldman: And we might add
2:04:21 Gary Oldman: multiplayer components to one of them.
2:04:24 Gary Oldman: I think one of them is going to be really tough later on,
2:04:25 Gary Oldman: but we’re still thinking that through.
2:04:29 Gary Oldman: But I think we’re really leaning into single-player experience
2:04:32 Gary Oldman: as being a strength for us as a company and something we love to do.
2:04:36 Gary Oldman: And I think something a large part of the audience prefers.
2:04:39 Gary Oldman: And I’d love to, with all of those,
2:04:42 Gary Oldman: keep single-player DLC one way or another going.
2:04:46 Gary Oldman: Were there some other game ideas you considered while at Rockstar and
2:04:49 Gary Oldman: afterwards that you didn’t go with?
2:04:53 Gary Oldman: So like worlds, I don’t know, pirate games?
2:04:56 Gary Oldman: I would love to see the possible options.
2:04:59 Gary Oldman: Never thought a lot about a pirate game.
2:05:03 Gary Oldman: My son is obsessed by that game Sea of Thieves at the moment,
2:05:04 Gary Oldman: so he’s constantly saying do a pirate game.
2:05:06 Gary Oldman: Haven’t really thought about it too much.
2:05:11 Gary Oldman: We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game.
2:05:12 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:05:13 Gary Oldman: And it never came together.
2:05:14 Gary Oldman: It’s the agent?
2:05:18 Gary Oldman: Agent and it’s had about five different iterations.
2:05:18 Gary Oldman: So good.
2:05:20 Gary Oldman: I don’t think it works.
2:05:24 Gary Oldman: I concluded, and I keep thinking about it sometimes.
2:05:25 Gary Oldman: I sometimes lie in bed thinking about it.
2:05:29 Gary Oldman: And I’ve concluded, what makes them really good
2:05:34 Gary Oldman: as film stories, makes them not work as video games,
2:05:37 Gary Oldman: or need to think through how to do it in a different way as a video game.
2:05:40 Gary Oldman: So for people who don’t know, it would be hypothetically
2:05:42 Gary Oldman: set in the 1970s Cold War era.
2:05:43 Gary Oldman: That was one of the versions.
2:05:45 Gary Oldman: There was another one that was set in current.
2:05:47 Gary Oldman: We had so many different versions of this game.
2:05:48 Gary Oldman: We worked on so many different teams.
2:05:51 Gary Oldman: But it would be more geopolitical, like espionage.
2:05:52 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:05:54 Gary Oldman: And assassinations.
2:05:54 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:05:55 Gary Oldman: Assassinations.
2:05:57 Gary Oldman: I don’t know what it would have been, because it never really,
2:06:00 Gary Oldman: we never got it enough to even doing a proper story on it.
2:06:03 Gary Oldman: We’re doing the early work as you get the world up and running.
2:06:06 Gary Oldman: It never, it never really found its feet in either of
2:06:07 Gary Oldman: So interesting.
2:06:08 Gary Oldman: And I sort of think I know why.
2:06:12 Gary Oldman: Because one of those films, they’re very,
2:06:13 Gary Oldman: very frenetic.
2:06:15 Gary Oldman: And they beat to beat to beat.
2:06:17 Gary Oldman: You know, you’ve got to go here and save the world.
2:06:19 Gary Oldman: You got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world.
2:06:23 Gary Oldman: And an open world game does have moments
2:06:25 Gary Oldman: like that when the story comes together.
2:06:27 Gary Oldman: But for large portions, it’s a lot kind of looser.
2:06:29 Gary Oldman: And you’re just hanging out.
2:06:30 Gary Oldman: And you’re just doing what you want.
2:06:31 Gary Oldman: And I want freedom.
2:06:32 Gary Oldman: And I want to go over here and do what I want.
2:06:34 Gary Oldman: And I want to go over and do what you want.
2:06:37 Gary Oldman: And that’s why it works well being a criminal because you fundamentally
2:06:38 Gary Oldman: don’t have anyone telling you what to do.
2:06:43 Gary Oldman: And we try and create, you know, external agency through these people kind of
2:06:45 Gary Oldman: forcing you into the story at times.
2:06:48 Gary Oldman: But as a spy, that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock.
2:06:50 Gary Oldman: So I think for me,
2:06:53 Gary Oldman: I question if you can even make a good open world spy game.
2:06:55 Gary Oldman: So interesting.
2:06:58 Gary Oldman: So you have to be able to ride around the car and listen to the radio.
2:06:59 Gary Oldman: And cruise about.
2:07:03 Gary Oldman: Or ride a horse and just look at nature.
2:07:07 Gary Oldman: So lots of things would work as open world games, but I don’t know for spiders.
2:07:09 Gary Oldman: That’s brilliantly put.
2:07:12 Gary Oldman: But to me, there’s such a espionage and assassinations
2:07:16 Gary Oldman: And the geopolitical international context is so interesting, but you’re right.
2:07:18 Gary Oldman: I just want to listen to, uh, what is it?
2:07:19 Gary Oldman: Laszlo.
2:07:21 Gary Oldman: Well, you can’t.
2:07:22 Gary Oldman: You’ve got to save the world.
2:07:24 Gary Oldman: And so you need this time pressure.
2:07:26 Gary Oldman: With a Russian accent or something.
2:07:26 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:07:28 Gary Oldman: Wow.
2:07:28 Gary Oldman: Wow.
2:07:29 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:07:30 Gary Oldman: That’s really interesting.
2:07:34 Gary Oldman: And then we played around with the Knights concept that was looking, you know,
2:07:39 Gary Oldman: Knights and sort of trying to do a version of a mythological game that could
2:07:44 have been fun and, you know, still love that idea, but never went very far with it.
2:07:47 Gary Oldman: Knights would be going really far back in history.
2:07:47 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:07:47 Gary Oldman: I would have to go.
2:07:50 Gary Oldman: It never got to writing any of it.
2:07:53 Gary Oldman: Just did some backstory and played around with a few ideas,
2:07:56 Gary Oldman: But it was always something I thought I would never do.
2:07:58 Gary Oldman: And then kind of fell in love with it a little bit.
2:08:04 Gary Oldman: You left Rockstar in 2020 and eventually launched Absurd Ventures,
2:08:05 Gary Oldman: as we’ve been talking about.
2:08:08 Gary Oldman: What do you miss about your time at Rockstar?
2:08:11 Gary Oldman: Is there specific moments that bring you joy when you think about them?
2:08:13 Gary Oldman: Of course, it was my whole, you know,
2:08:17 Gary Oldman: It was my life for 20 something years, 21 years or something.
2:08:18 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:08:23 Gary Oldman: And I moved to America to do it and grew up doing it.
2:08:25 Gary Oldman: And I was always living in New York.
2:08:31 Gary Oldman: It was at times very intense and at other times magical experience.
2:08:34 Gary Oldman: But it was also just a huge chunk of my life.
2:08:36 Gary Oldman: The lows and the highs?
2:08:37 Gary Oldman: And the middles.
2:08:38 Gary Oldman: It was just my life.
2:08:38 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:08:42 Gary Oldman: My life was that job and the people I knew in New York and my family.
2:08:49 Gary Oldman: And we were doing something that was intense and innovative and, you know,
2:08:53 Gary Oldman: both loved and hated by wider society in different ways and at different times.
2:08:56 Gary Oldman: And in this weird company that was constantly in trouble.
2:08:58 Gary Oldman: So it was really fun.
2:09:01 Gary Oldman: Just even looking back at that time to today,
2:09:05 Gary Oldman: How did you evolve as a creative mind across those 20 years?
2:09:06 Gary Oldman: Well, I was a child.
2:09:10 Gary Oldman: I was a 25 year old child who didn’t know anything.
2:09:14 Gary Oldman: And I wanted to be a writer, but I still wasn’t writing.
2:09:18 Gary Oldman: And I bought a notebook and I’d occasionally scribble in it.
2:09:19 Gary Oldman: And I still got those notebooks somewhere.
2:09:21 Gary Oldman: And I was working in video games,
2:09:24 Gary Oldman: which were the least literary medium
2:09:25 Gary Oldman: it’s possible to imagine at the time.
2:09:28 Gary Oldman: There was no room for that on PS1 games, really.
2:09:33 Gary Oldman: Thinking I needed to stop and do something else,
2:09:36 Gary Oldman: but not having the skills or the confidence to do it.
2:09:39 Gary Oldman: And I’d been doing that in London.
2:09:42 Gary Oldman: And then I came to New York and it was fun, really fun to be in New York,
2:09:45 Gary Oldman: and really fun to do a new company in New York.
2:09:46 Gary Oldman: And that was an amazing adventure,
2:09:47 Gary Oldman: but I was still lost as a human being.
2:09:53 Gary Oldman: And then when I was 27, I still completely lost, a child.
2:09:55 Gary Oldman: And I stopped some of my bad behavior.
2:09:56 Gary Oldman: And the next day,
2:10:02 Gary Oldman: pretty much the chance to work on open world games and all the skills I’d half
2:10:03 Gary Oldman: learned over the previous years.
2:10:06 Gary Oldman: And my way of thinking where I thought about space a lot,
2:10:09 Gary Oldman: because I was a geographer rather than a historian,
2:10:12 Gary Oldman: came together and I got the chance to work on open world games.
2:10:13 Gary Oldman: I felt like it was meant to be.
2:10:14 Gary Oldman: It was fun to explore,
2:10:17 Gary Oldman: but really fun to explore with this team that was,
2:10:21 Gary Oldman: you know, Alex Horton and Naveed and Leslie and the guys in Scotland
2:10:27 Gary Oldman: and all the people in New York making these new games in this new way and going,
2:10:29 Gary Oldman: oh, we need to find a hundred voices.
2:10:30 Gary Oldman: We’ve got no money.
2:10:31 Gary Oldman: How the hell are we going to do that?
2:10:34 Gary Oldman: We’ll get everyone’s friends in and just record four lines of dialogue each,
2:10:37 Gary Oldman: as we kind of would invent the way that pedestrians are speaking video games.
2:10:38 Gary Oldman: No one else was doing that kind of stuff.
2:10:39 Gary Oldman: It was insane.
2:10:44 Gary Oldman: So I think that period from kind of 2001, 2005,
2:10:49 Gary Oldman: it was lots of early innovation and felt really exciting because we were doing new
2:10:49 Gary Oldman: stuff.
2:10:53 Gary Oldman: It didn’t feel it felt creative,
2:10:54 Gary Oldman: but it didn’t feel like writing yet.
2:10:57 Gary Oldman: Just becoming that we felt lots of doing lots of creative things
2:11:00 Gary Oldman: and learning how to assemble the stuff and learning what it could take.
2:11:02 Gary Oldman: And then I think we talked about it earlier,
2:11:07 Gary Oldman: but the journey into doing GTA 4 when it began to feel more like a proper writing experience.
2:11:10 Gary Oldman: And I was kind of probably ready for that at that point.
2:11:13 Gary Oldman: And then I was like, well, this is better than films.
2:11:14 Gary Oldman: This is something that films can’t do.
2:11:19 Gary Oldman: You know, this 360 degree experience of being this immigrant.
2:11:21 Gary Oldman: And it’s still felt that we were still only scratching the surface.
2:11:23 Gary Oldman: I mean, it still feels like that now in some ways,
2:11:24 Gary Oldman: but it still felt like that.
2:11:27 Gary Oldman: And then that five games, you know,
2:11:34 Gary Oldman: GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead 1 and 2, all the extra packs for them and Max Payne 3,
2:11:37 Gary Oldman: I think we took the games thematically into new places through that period.
2:11:40 Gary Oldman: From a writing perspective, that was the most exciting period.
2:11:43 Gary Oldman: From a business and sort of early creativity period,
2:11:47 Gary Oldman: the period 2001 to 2005 was probably the most exciting.
2:11:50 Gary Oldman: The original starting team, we were all doing well.
2:11:53 Gary Oldman: Personal life was doing okay.
2:11:55 Gary Oldman: Didn’t feel like such a mess.
2:11:58 Gary Oldman: And then from 2007 onwards,
2:12:00 Gary Oldman: 7-8 was happy personally.
2:12:04 Gary Oldman: Having children, happily married.
2:12:07 Gary Oldman: And the games were just getting much better.
2:12:09 Gary Oldman: But there were lots of pressure in the business.
2:12:11 Gary Oldman: And the budgets got really big.
2:12:12 Gary Oldman: So I had this other stress.
2:12:15 Gary Oldman: So there’s always, always good bits and stresses.
2:12:18 Gary Oldman: But you know, I always just tried to
2:12:23 Gary Oldman: sharpen, do my best and think about how I could do it in a new way.
2:12:25 Gary Oldman: Always trying to go, it’s a new medium.
2:12:26 Gary Oldman: What can we do that’s new?
2:12:28 Gary Oldman: But as a writer, as a
2:12:34 Gary Oldman: A scholar of human nature, first of all, were you surprised that you were actually
2:12:40 Gary Oldman: able, like you had it in you through humor and tragedy to create these incredibly
2:12:41 Gary Oldman: compelling characters?
2:12:46 Gary Oldman: Because I think I remember reading somewhere that James Joyce, when he was 20,
2:12:49 Gary Oldman: said that he’s going to be the greatest writer ever.
2:12:53 Gary Oldman: And I feel like every 20-year-old says this.
2:12:55 Gary Oldman: It’s just James Joyce pulls it off.
2:12:56 Gary Oldman: Yes.
2:13:01 Gary Oldman: So were you surprised that you were actually able to do it?
2:13:05 Gary Oldman: And how did that person get better and better and better at writing as you evolved?
2:13:07 Gary Oldman: The team got better and better.
2:13:10 Gary Oldman: So we could write in a more ambitious way.
2:13:14 Gary Oldman: The animation got better so we could support it in a better way.
2:13:15 Gary Oldman: We could go deeper.
2:13:17 Gary Oldman: I mean, you couldn’t go that deep on a PS2 game.
2:13:19 Gary Oldman: So it was also just the technology evolved.
2:13:23 Gary Oldman: I don’t know.
2:13:28 Gary Oldman: I felt like I felt like I was good at doing it and well-trained for it.
2:13:30 Gary Oldman: And I’d been in the right place at the right time.
2:13:36 Gary Oldman: And I was both lucky and had a way of thinking about characters that when you reduce
2:13:38 Gary Oldman: them to about 10 sentences was amusing.
2:13:46 Gary Oldman: And I saw the world in a holistic way and saw society in a holistic way that you could
2:13:48 Gary Oldman: break apart into an open world video game.
2:13:50 Gary Oldman: I thought about it a bunch.
2:13:53 Gary Oldman: The way I think about things was suitable for that.
2:13:55 Gary Oldman: For whatever reason, just that was just good fortune.
2:13:59 Gary Oldman: Laszlo mentioned that it was another legend who you’re still working with.
2:14:02 Gary Oldman: He mentioned that you would
2:14:06 Gary Oldman: lock yourself in writing dialogue for radio.
2:14:11 Gary Oldman: I think you lock yourself in a room and get anchovies and onion pizza and
2:14:12 Gary Oldman: crushed Diet Cokes.
2:14:14 Gary Oldman: Is this accurate information?
2:14:14 Gary Oldman: Very accurate.
2:14:19 Gary Oldman: For which periods of your life was this a fuel for your creative process?
2:14:20 Gary Oldman: Is it anchovies and onion pizza?
2:14:24 Gary Oldman: I would also get pepperoni on my half just to be technically accurate.
2:14:24 Gary Oldman: Okay.
2:14:26 Gary Oldman: He wouldn’t because he claimed to be a vegetarian in those days.
2:14:27 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:14:29 Gary Oldman: But then he’d admit to me he kept chicken wings hidden in the freezer.
2:14:30 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:14:32 Gary Oldman: So it was a sort of fake vegetarian.
2:14:35 Gary Oldman: That was, I think we still do it now sometimes as sort of-
2:14:37 Gary Oldman: Homage.
2:14:39 Gary Oldman: But that began in 2001.
2:14:39 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:14:45 Gary Oldman: And we, the office at Rockstar was so small and we were so broke that there was no,
2:14:48 Gary Oldman: And I did have a private office at the time, but it genuinely was a cupboard.
2:14:50 Gary Oldman: It didn’t have a window.
2:14:52 Gary Oldman: I was literally sitting in a cupboard.
2:14:56 Gary Oldman: So there was no room and I could, I had a desk and a chair just for myself.
2:14:58 Gary Oldman: So we, but I lived quite near the office.
2:15:01 Gary Oldman: So we would write one or two afternoons a week.
2:15:03 Gary Oldman: He’d come in, he was a freelancer working with us.
2:15:09 Gary Oldman: He’d come in from Long Island and then we would jump on the subway, go to my
2:15:12 Gary Oldman: apartment in Chelsea and sit in this grimy little apartment I was living in
2:15:14 Gary Oldman: and buy pizza from around the corner.
2:15:17 Gary Oldman: And that became, you know, we both like Diet Coke and pizza.
2:15:19 Gary Oldman: Very video game developer.
2:15:21 Gary Oldman: And that became good luck.
2:15:24 Gary Oldman: And we’d have these good writing sessions where we realized we got on well with
2:15:27 Gary Oldman: each other and that we had a similar sense of humor and we could write the stuff.
2:15:29 Gary Oldman: And then he would do all of the real work producing it.
2:15:32 Gary Oldman: So it was perfect for me because I got to outsource most of the real work.
2:15:34 Gary Oldman: And he’s a brilliant radio producer.
2:15:36 Gary Oldman: So he was a great partner in that way.
2:15:39 Gary Oldman: And then that was how that relationship began.
2:15:42 Gary Oldman: And then I’d get him, I’d say, well, we’ve got to record these 80 voices,
2:15:45 Gary Oldman: come and help me because I can’t direct 80 people at once.
2:15:46 Gary Oldman: So he would help with that process.
2:15:49 Gary Oldman: And he was a really good producer, like audio,
2:15:52 Gary Oldman: like getting bodies in produce as well as a technical producer.
2:15:54 Gary Oldman: So he was just, that was the beginning of that relationship.
2:15:59 Gary Oldman: And it was always, my job was to ensure the media content felt like it reflected
2:16:02 Gary Oldman: the tone of the world and we would write it together.
2:16:03 Gary Oldman: Then his job was just to make sure it sounded funny.
2:16:05 Gary Oldman: Like he would just produce it in a really funny way.
2:16:09 Gary Oldman: Just to give a little bit more of a shout out to Laszlo.
2:16:12 Gary Oldman: What’s it been like working with him for over 20 years?
2:16:19 Gary Oldman: He’s working with you still, he’s a kind of this flamboyant, colorful personality,
2:16:27 Gary Oldman: much loved for being a voice also on radio in the Grand Theft Auto games.
2:16:27 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:16:31 Gary Oldman: And the rule was when he was the character, I would write the first pass.
2:16:36 Gary Oldman: So I would, and I would get nastier and nastier over time.
2:16:36 Gary Oldman: Yeah, that’s awesome.
2:16:38 Gary Oldman: So to the point when he’s having his head shaved and, you know,
2:16:42 Gary Oldman: Being punished by everybody, but even in game after game, he got worse.
2:16:42 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:16:45 Gary Oldman: He began as his quite, in GTA 3, he’s a quite likable character.
2:16:50 Gary Oldman: And then, you know, over the next 12, 13 years, it just got worse and worse.
2:16:51 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:16:55 Gary Oldman: So I think he’s glad not to be doing that anymore, but he did it with great grace.
2:17:00 Gary Oldman: He’s just a great partner because he likes, he like, you know, like me, we just like making stuff.
2:17:01 Gary Oldman: He likes to make stuff.
2:17:03 Gary Oldman: He likes to work in new spaces.
2:17:07 Gary Oldman: He’s been a great help on bringing the comic book to life, doing a lot of the work on that.
2:17:08 Gary Oldman: He’s working on that right now.
2:17:13 Gary Oldman: And just, he’s really fun to work with.
2:17:15 Gary Oldman: And he’s, you know, always will put creativity first.
2:17:18 Gary Oldman: And he’s ridiculous.
2:17:20 Gary Oldman: In the best possible way.
2:17:25 Gary Oldman: Outside of the games you’ve participated in and created,
2:17:29 Gary Oldman: What do you think are some candidates for the greatest game of all time?
2:17:30 Gary Oldman: Tetris.
2:17:32 Gary Oldman: Tetris.
2:17:33 Gary Oldman: Tetris Game Boy.
2:17:34 Gary Oldman: No question.
2:17:35 Gary Oldman: Tetris and a Game Boy.
2:17:36 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:17:38 Gary Oldman: It was the perfect device for playing that game.
2:17:40 Gary Oldman: I never liked it as much as anything else.
2:17:45 Gary Oldman: My wife was trying to get a retro one for my kids, trying to get them for Christmas
2:17:46 right now.
2:17:51 Gary Oldman: It was the most addicted I ever was to anything in my life of far too many addictions.
2:17:54 Gary Oldman: I was obsessed by it, dreaming about it.
2:17:57 Gary Oldman: And when you link two together with the cable, and if I got four, it would push
2:17:59 Gary Oldman: I was like the perfect game design.
2:18:03 Gary Oldman: So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.
2:18:05 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it’s extremely simple.
2:18:06 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:18:08 Gary Oldman: Pure gameplay, no narrative.
2:18:09 Gary Oldman: No, no, nothing.
2:18:11 Gary Oldman: No, no personality at all.
2:18:12 Gary Oldman: It’s a completely different thing.
2:18:13 Gary Oldman: Perfection.
2:18:15 Gary Oldman: But perfect in its way.
2:18:16 Gary Oldman: Open world games can’t be that perfect.
2:18:17 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:18:19 Gary Oldman: But you always dream of making something like that.
2:18:20 Gary Oldman: There’s Super Mario.
2:18:29 Gary Oldman: I think the N64 ones, all of those early 3D games were very amazing when you
2:18:35 first saw them on the N64 PS one, when you went, it suddenly was like these games, they’re
2:18:37 alive and they’re believable in a different way.
2:18:39 Gary Oldman: I think that was very interesting.
2:18:40 Gary Oldman: It looks like anything else.
2:18:42 Gary Oldman: Nintendo has that look.
2:18:42 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:18:43 Gary Oldman: Always.
2:18:43 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:18:50 Gary Oldman: And I think that’s the, they’re known for this Nintendo polish, every pixel has
2:18:51 a purpose.
2:18:51 Gary Oldman: Yes.
2:18:57 Gary Oldman: And Woody, I mean, I suppose Tetris has that same real focus on delivering a pure
2:19:01 gaming experience with as little as possible.
2:19:01 Gary Oldman: It’s really beautiful.
2:19:08 Gary Oldman: And of course, Zelda really pioneered a lot of sort of the feeling of, of a world,
2:19:09 but it’s not quite open.
2:19:11 Gary Oldman: No, but it’s amazing.
2:19:15 Gary Oldman: It’s almost like the new ones, they almost to me feel like Hitchcock.
2:19:19 They just speaking the language of video games, you know, like, you know,
2:19:21 Gary Oldman: everything’s going to work this way and that way.
2:19:26 Gary Oldman: It’s, it’s quite systemic, but it’s so, how it all glues together is so amazing.
2:19:29 Gary Oldman: It feels like that when you watch a Hitchcock film, it’s not reality.
2:19:33 Gary Oldman: He’s speaking the language of cinema in a very, very strong, without a very strong
2:19:35 Gary Oldman: accent almost, it’s very, very cinematic.
2:19:37 Gary Oldman: It’s not realism at all.
2:19:42 Gary Oldman: And that’s what those Zelda games kind of feel to me, that there are these amazing things that could only be video games.
2:19:43 Gary Oldman: They couldn’t be anything else.
2:19:49 Gary Oldman: For me, another really powerful open world is the, the Elder Scrolls world.
2:19:54 Gary Oldman: It’s role playing, it’s a fantasy dragons, all that kind of stuff.
2:19:55 Gary Oldman: Todd is great at what he does.
2:19:56 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:20:06 Gary Oldman: There’s a, there’s slightly, they’re more, I mean, from a technical perspective, we’re always involved in the same with the new, with the new games.
2:20:19 Gary Oldman: We’re constantly trying to find the balance between, you know, RPG, a role playing game and an action game and an, you know, and try to go, well, an action adventure game with RPG elements.
2:20:20 Gary Oldman: And what does that mean?
2:20:23 Gary Oldman: And I think they’ve all kind of moved into roughly the same space.
2:20:27 Gary Oldman: But for me, it always just comes down to our, is it easy to play our mechanics, super slick.
2:20:30 Gary Oldman: And then can we keep our dialogue feeling very alive?
2:20:35 Gary Oldman: Like I’m not always a great for just what we do.
2:20:36 Gary Oldman: I like when other people do it for what we do.
2:20:38 Gary Oldman: We always want very punchy dialogue.
2:20:42 Gary Oldman: So don’t give big trees, but still have it interactive.
2:20:51 Gary Oldman: So we’re going to, we’re going to lose a touch of interactivity, but we’ll still have the dialogue feeling like it’s alive, but we’ll get better written dialogue and it feel more, a slightly more cinematic experience.
2:20:52 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:20:58 Gary Oldman: I think the Elder Scrolls series have almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.
2:20:59 Gary Oldman: Yes.
2:21:00 Gary Oldman: They’re real RPGs.
2:21:00 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:21:07 Gary Oldman: You know, we’ve not really, the games that, you know, I’ve worked on, they’ve not really been RPGs.
2:21:10 Gary Oldman: They’ve had RPG elements onto a story-driven action game.
2:21:14 Gary Oldman: It’s a kind of just a slightly different emphasis, but I still think what they do is amazing.
2:21:15 Gary Oldman: And he’s brilliant at doing it.
2:21:27 Gary Oldman: And I think Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim are games where you have millions of people that just walk around or drive around.
2:21:28 Gary Oldman: And feel the world.
2:21:29 Gary Oldman: Feel the world.
2:21:29 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:21:30 Gary Oldman: Just feel the world.
2:21:31 Gary Oldman: And The Witcher, same thing.
2:21:35 Gary Oldman: And Baldur’s Gate 1, 2, and 3, really interesting.
2:21:47 Gary Oldman: They really tried to make every choice that you make, genuinely branched the game to where it’s not the illusion of choice, it’s really, choice really does something.
2:21:49 Gary Oldman: And that’s really hard to pull off, technically.
2:21:51 Gary Oldman: Yes, and hard to pull off.
2:22:00 Gary Oldman: You’re always sort of debating the sweet spot between that and a strong story, you know, and strong mechanics.
2:22:09 Gary Oldman: It’s hard to get them all and you, you know, as a, as a, as a game making team, the whole, you know, the teams kind of have to figure out where they want to fall on that line.
2:22:21 Gary Oldman: A difficult topic, uh, you dedicated the book to your mom and dad, and in particular you wrote to my father who died while I was finishing the book.
2:22:25 Gary Oldman: What have you learned about life from your dad?
2:22:30 Gary Oldman: To show up, to be present, to go to work.
2:22:39 Gary Oldman: To work every day, to love creative things, you know, he was a lawyer, but he’s also a jazz musician.
2:22:50 Gary Oldman: And he did both to the best of his abilities, you know, and that to value family as more important than either of those things.
2:22:53 Gary Oldman: You know, he was a present guy.
2:23:00 Gary Oldman: I think, and, and, you know, he loved books, always loved books, always loved, but loved films, loved music.
2:23:05 Gary Oldman: Didn’t, wasn’t into video games, but liked that we were doing weird things.
2:23:07 Gary Oldman: Was he proud of you?
2:23:09 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I think so.
2:23:10 Gary Oldman: I hope so.
2:23:21 Gary Oldman: And he was, he was for, for a lawyer, he really venerated at some level, giving the man, the, the, the quote unquote, the man, the finger.
2:23:25 Gary Oldman: Like, you know, whenever life goes crazy.
2:23:25 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:23:29 Gary Oldman: He just was always on the side of the underdog and the ridiculous.
2:23:35 Gary Oldman: And, and I think that, you know, he always wanted to answer people back, always give the silly comment.
2:23:40 Gary Oldman: And I certainly, you know, taken that from him to my detriment probably, but it makes life more fun.
2:23:44 Gary Oldman: Like he always would just say the obnoxious thing and just didn’t give a fuck.
2:23:49 Gary Oldman: And that was, uh, you know, I think that was probably quite inspiring.
2:23:51 Gary Oldman: So you have a bit of that in you?
2:23:57 Gary Oldman: Unfortunately, so yes, not good at shutting up, not good at toeing the line.
2:24:08 Gary Oldman: I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of, as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.
2:24:10 Gary Oldman: I think it made school difficult.
2:24:14 Gary Oldman: You know, they sent me this very formal school.
2:24:14 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:24:19 Gary Oldman: That was like, it might as well have been set in the 1870s, in the 1990s.
2:24:24 Gary Oldman: And, but then they want, you know, they always get in trouble just for not, not for doing anything that wrong.
2:24:26 Gary Oldman: Just answering teachers back all of the time.
2:24:27 Gary Oldman: Couldn’t be quiet.
2:24:31 Gary Oldman: How often do you think about mortality?
2:24:34 Gary Oldman: Are you personally yourself afraid of death?
2:24:40 Gary Oldman: Well, my father passed away in May.
2:24:46 Gary Oldman: So a lot more since then, obviously.
2:24:48 Gary Oldman: I mean, I think about it a lot.
2:24:49 Gary Oldman: Am I afraid of it?
2:24:51 Gary Oldman: I don’t know.
2:24:54 Gary Oldman: Some days intensely, and some days not at all.
2:25:00 Gary Oldman: I would love to stay alive long enough to see my kids properly go up and settled,
2:25:01 Gary Oldman: of course, for them.
2:25:02 Gary Oldman: I don’t know.
2:25:07 Gary Oldman: Aside from that, some days I feel, you know, spiritually connected to the universe,
2:25:09 Gary Oldman: and not afraid of death at all.
2:25:15 Gary Oldman: And other days I feel like a sort of random piece of good luck who’s going to
2:25:19 Gary Oldman: get struck down by an angry fate and turn to nothingness, and that terrifies me.
2:25:21 Gary Oldman: What do you think about the nothingness?
2:25:23 Gary Oldman: I mean, that in itself is terrifying.
2:25:25 Gary Oldman: Yeah, that is terrifying.
2:25:27 Gary Oldman: I mean, I tend to,
2:25:36 Gary Oldman: I tend to, you know, I’ve spent long periods of my life tormented by that stuff.
2:25:42 Gary Oldman: The last few years, I tend to believe there is a purpose and a point to life, and that we
2:25:47 Gary Oldman: have some kind of spiritual or soul-based existence.
2:25:49 Gary Oldman: I’m not quite sure if it matters if there is a God or not.
2:25:51 Gary Oldman: We should probably live our lives the same way either way.
2:25:57 Gary Oldman: But I tend to think that, you know, there is a metaphysical purpose to life.
2:26:00 Gary Oldman: And part of that purpose is to, you know, search for the purpose.
2:26:04 Gary Oldman: But at other points, you can get, you know, if you read too much science,
2:26:06 Gary Oldman: you get wrapped up in the nothingness of it all.
2:26:09 Gary Oldman: Also, there’s a component to your brain.
2:26:14 Gary Oldman: When talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, you said that
2:26:17 Gary Oldman: you have been, by fortune, struck with a bit of a
2:26:20 Gary Oldman: capacity for the grandiosity of feeling.
2:26:23 Gary Oldman: So you feel the world deeply, sometimes romantic,
2:26:24 Gary Oldman: sometimes overly romantic.
2:26:28 Gary Oldman: You’ve said, I like this line, feelings may destroy you,
2:26:29 Gary Oldman: but they’re the best thing we have.
2:26:38 Gary Oldman: So that ability to feel the world, is that a gift or a curse for you?
2:26:38 Gary Oldman: What do you think?
2:26:42 Gary Oldman: That’s a really interesting question, because it’s obviously both.
2:26:44 Gary Oldman: You know, times it’s both, or times it’s one or the other.
2:26:48 Gary Oldman: When things are going well, when you feel alive, when you feel
2:26:51 Gary Oldman: like you’re connected to things, when you’re seeing
2:26:55 Gary Oldman: beauty in people and joy in experiences.
2:26:58 Gary Oldman: Of course, it’s wonderful when you’re feeling like,
2:27:01 Gary Oldman: you know, bereft and set adrift by the world,
2:27:03 Gary Oldman: and that you can’t connect it to it in some way.
2:27:05 Gary Oldman: And you’re lost and abandoned by
2:27:09 Gary Oldman: God or consciousness or fate or whatever it is.
2:27:10 Gary Oldman: It’s awful.
2:27:11 Gary Oldman: You know, when I feel like
2:27:15 Gary Oldman: a dreadful hack, which is most of the time.
2:27:17 Gary Oldman: You know, it’s terrible.
2:27:18 Gary Oldman: You’d rather not be doing this rubbish.
2:27:21 Gary Oldman: And then sometimes you’re working creatively and it feels good and you feel
2:27:23 Gary Oldman: like you’re doing the right thing and it feels fantastic.
2:27:25 Gary Oldman: But that’s not very often.
2:27:28 Gary Oldman: Do you think it’s possible to have one without the other?
2:27:28 Gary Oldman: No.
2:27:29 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:27:30 Gary Oldman: No, of course not.
2:27:35 Gary Oldman: When I think about growing up to the extent that I am capable of growing up,
2:27:42 Gary Oldman: it is about accepting the bad with the good from any situation or any aspect of myself,
2:27:45 Gary Oldman: you know, going, okay, it’s not perfect or I’m not perfect.
2:27:49 Gary Oldman: You said you often feel like a hack.
2:27:52 Gary Oldman: Is that that self-critical part of your brain?
2:27:57 Gary Oldman: Is that a feature or a bug?
2:28:01 Gary Oldman: I think it’s the new thing that we’re going to lean into, the bug feature.
2:28:02 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:28:03 Gary Oldman: It’s both, isn’t it?
2:28:06 Gary Oldman: I mean, it’s, it’s, it cannot lead that self-critical brain.
2:28:08 Gary Oldman: I think lots of people suffer from.
2:28:11 Gary Oldman: And I think the internet is designed to induce.
2:28:14 Gary Oldman: If you didn’t have it before, you will have it after being online.
2:28:17 Gary Oldman: Um, it’s clearly can become a bug,
2:28:22 Gary Oldman: but it also can give you drive and a lack of complacency.
2:28:23 Gary Oldman: So it can also become a feature.
2:28:27 Gary Oldman: I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti,
2:28:32 Gary Oldman: who’s a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind about this.
2:28:36 Gary Oldman: Um, he worked with many famous creative people.
2:28:43 Gary Oldman: And he, he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius.
2:28:48 Gary Oldman: And I thought I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.
2:28:54 Gary Oldman: I’d rather not have it, but I certainly have lived with it this far.
2:29:01 Gary Oldman: There’s a danger that negativity, for me, that negativity and consciousness become
2:29:02 Gary Oldman: the same thing.
2:29:07 Gary Oldman: You know, and sometimes I have to fight to not just be perpetually negative.
2:29:11 Gary Oldman: And that can be part of the human struggle for lots of people, and certainly has
2:29:11 Gary Oldman: been for me.
2:29:15 Gary Oldman: I think if you’re trying to do, you know,
2:29:19 Gary Oldman: good stuff and you’re reflective inevitably, and you know,
2:29:24 Gary Oldman: you live in this world of constant, constant criticisms by the internet.
2:29:27 Gary Oldman: Of course, you know, everyone who ever put something on the internet, be it
2:29:31 Gary Oldman: a picture of themselves or any kind of work they’ve made or whatever it is,
2:29:34 Gary Oldman: is going to get 50 good comments and one bad comment.
2:29:35 Gary Oldman: And remember the bad comment.
2:29:38 Gary Oldman: So that, and that, that becomes fuel for the negative voice.
2:29:41 Gary Oldman: I don’t know anyone that’s strong enough not to know, you know, we all, you know,
2:29:45 Gary Oldman: some level, you should just measure that stuff in, in weight, not in, not in quality.
2:29:46 Gary Oldman: But of course we just focus on the quality.
2:29:51 Gary Oldman: And I do think in general, as you get older, that’s a real challenge for people.
2:29:55 Gary Oldman: You can see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it’s easy to slip
2:30:03 Gary Oldman: into cynicism and negativity into this, uh, Dostoevsky’s notes from underground nihilistic
2:30:04 Gary Oldman: kind of worldview.
2:30:10 Gary Oldman: I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see
2:30:17 Gary Oldman: more good to, uh, I think there’s probably a hero’s journey of being extremely
2:30:24 Gary Oldman: self-critical at first, uh, for, for the, the, the, the first, maybe half of your
2:30:25 Gary Oldman: life or two Thursday.
2:30:31 Gary Oldman: And then while maintaining some self-critical aspects, just so you stay humble,
2:30:35 Gary Oldman: start to see the good, uh, in everything around you and other people in the world.
2:30:39 Gary Oldman: And even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.
2:30:41 Gary Oldman: I hope so.
2:30:45 Gary Oldman: I mean, that’s what I’ve been, uh, I could not be more cynical.
2:30:46 Gary Oldman: I think you put that beautifully.
2:30:49 Gary Oldman: I could not be more cynical than I was as a child.
2:30:51 Gary Oldman: You know, I could not see goodness anywhere.
2:30:58 Gary Oldman: I, I couldn’t see, you know, I don’t think, uh, late 1970s to early 1990s,
2:31:03 Gary Oldman: England was a great, it was a place of great, you know, optimism and naivety.
2:31:07 Gary Oldman: It was brutal and I was brutal, I was brutal within it.
2:31:13 Gary Oldman: And I think, um, I’ve become much more naive and, and, and try to become more
2:31:17 Gary Oldman: innocent in some ways and always try to see the flawed good in people.
2:31:22 Gary Oldman: You know, I’ve tried to, and I’ve had to force myself to be like that because,
2:31:24 Gary Oldman: you know, the other way is not fun.
2:31:27 Gary Oldman: It’s not nice to, to, it’s not nice to not be nice.
2:31:31 Gary Oldman: Uh, as a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with, uh,
2:31:34 Gary Oldman: Ryan McCaffrey at, uh, LA Comic-Con.
2:31:36 Gary Oldman: I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time.
2:31:40 Gary Oldman: He writes amazing stuff at IGN and he has a great podcast.
2:31:41 Gary Oldman: Everybody should go listen to it.
2:31:42 Gary Oldman: I really enjoyed it.
2:31:45 Gary Oldman: Plus I get to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience.
2:31:48 Gary Oldman: And like we’re saying offline, uh, the LA Comic-Con,
2:31:49 Gary Oldman: it’s the first Comic-Con I’ve been to.
2:31:53 Gary Oldman: There’s just all kinds of real genuine nerds, good hearted.
2:31:54 Gary Oldman: Oh, it’s fascinating.
2:31:55 Gary Oldman: Brilliant.
2:32:01 Gary Oldman: So much kindness and goodness and just simple joy and being a fan of a thing.
2:32:03 Gary Oldman: Yeah, which is what those things are all about.
2:32:03 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:32:04 Gary Oldman: Okay.
2:32:07 Gary Oldman: So let’s talk about some of the greatest books of all time.
2:32:11 Gary Oldman: And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonia Walger,
2:32:14 Gary Oldman: who’s a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast.
2:32:17 Gary Oldman: She has guests pick their five favorite, most impactful books and so on.
2:32:24 Gary Oldman: Uh, you picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life.
2:32:26 Gary Oldman: For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation.
2:32:30 Gary Oldman: But you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom.
2:32:33 Gary Oldman: Uh, second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
2:32:35 Gary Oldman: Then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Frisgerald.
2:32:38 Gary Oldman: Uh, The Thin Red Line by James Jones.
2:32:40 Gary Oldman: And Middle March by George Eliot.
2:32:46 Gary Oldman: But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think if an
2:32:51 alien came, what are, what are some candidates for books that you’ll recommend to them?
2:32:52 Gary Oldman: Middle March.
2:32:52 Gary Oldman: Middle March.
2:32:54 Gary Oldman: It’s the best novel written in English.
2:32:56 Gary Oldman: War and Peace.
2:33:00 Gary Oldman: It’s the, one of the best novels written in Russian.
2:33:02 Gary Oldman: I would argue.
2:33:07 Gary Oldman: I think both of those are, because if you’ve only got one book, you want a long book.
2:33:08 Gary Oldman: Yeah, true.
2:33:14 Gary Oldman: And they’re both books that kind of, it’s something I was always trying to put into
2:33:20 games and, you know, that feeling of all of life is here. You know, you’ve got love, death, violence,
2:33:25 Gary Oldman: romance, the whole human experience in different ways. So I think that there’s something
2:33:29 Gary Oldman: amazing about, you know, Vanity Fair. I used to, used to love the novel, not the,
2:33:33 not the magazine. Um, because same thing, all of life is here.
2:33:37 Gary Oldman: You also spoke highly of Scott Frisgerald and Hemingway.
2:33:39 Gary Oldman: I was obsessed by them in my twenties.
2:33:40 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:33:41 Gary Oldman: Completely obsessed.
2:33:42 Gary Oldman: As one must be.
2:33:42 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:33:43 Gary Oldman: Absolutely.
2:33:50 Gary Oldman: And I think them as a double act is so amazing. You know, one helped discover the
2:33:58 other and then died first. And then suddenly it died in, in obscurity and then was rediscovered
2:34:02 as a genius while the other one was still alive and falling into not obscurity, but into decline.
2:34:06 Gary Oldman: I think it’s that their relationship is itself very novelistic.
2:34:11 Gary Oldman: That, that, by the way, is a phenomena of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still,
2:34:17 uh, that, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died
2:34:21 in obscurity, not, nobody knows them and they become famous later.
2:34:21 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:34:24 Gary Oldman: That is just so interesting. That’s such an interesting,
2:34:30 Gary Oldman: you know, that Franz Kafka and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted
2:34:37 all of his work to be burnt, like destroyed. So that insecurity, speaking of the critical voice
2:34:43 is just, uh, and I, I think he’s one of the, um, one of the best writers of the 20th century.
2:34:49 Gary Oldman: Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting. 1984, um, Brave New World.
2:34:53 Gary Oldman: Love 1984, had never listened to it or read it. And then I think I did it on talking
2:34:57 Gary Oldman: Or maybe read it. I can’t remember during COVID and became, I think I did both,
2:35:02 Gary Oldman: became obsessed by it. And it’s the elements of that creeping into a better paradise,
2:35:05 Gary Oldman: but it’s so good. I hadn’t realized how good it was.
2:35:06 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:35:07 Gary Oldman: And it’s so of the moment.
2:35:10 Gary Oldman: It’s almost like, because of his fame and
2:35:10 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:35:13 Gary Oldman: it’s almost like cliche and you think of the character.
2:35:16 Gary Oldman: Yeah, it’s all English. And I remember the year 1984, and you’re like,
2:35:19 Gary Oldman: this is, I remember the song, you know, it’s too much.
2:35:19 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:35:23 Gary Oldman: It can’t be that good. And then it was that. I came to it completely cold,
2:35:25 Gary Oldman: just, oh, I should get work my way through this because it’s another classic I
2:35:28 Gary Oldman: haven’t read. And then it’s, it’s incredible.
2:35:31 Gary Oldman: And the book I’ve read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George
2:35:39 Gary Oldman: I don’t know why exactly, but the childlike fairy tale telling of totalitarianism.
2:35:41 Gary Oldman: Well, you grew up in a communist country.
2:35:43 Gary Oldman: Yeah. Maybe that’s it. The roots of it.
2:35:47 Gary Oldman: I remember, you know, I was a kid in the Cold War in London and we were
2:35:51 Gary Oldman: always terrified of Eastern Europeans. You were going to come and kill us all. And then
2:35:54 Gary Oldman: I ended up marrying a pole.
2:35:55 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:36:01 Gary Oldman: And, um, and I was, we were, and we had Ukrainians, you know, who worked for us and
2:36:06 Gary Oldman: worked with us. And I was sitting a few years ago, sitting around a campfire in upstate New
2:36:11 Gary Oldman: New York surrounded with the, with the campfire was built by our old nanny’s husband,
2:36:15 Gary Oldman: who’s Ukrainian. And he’d been in the Red Army. And I was like, history is so strange
2:36:17 Gary Oldman: that you end up, the Red Army used to be the ultimate enemy.
2:36:20 Gary Oldman: And we’re like, we’re now just hanging out with it, but everything changes.
2:36:23 Gary Oldman: You think these, you think these things are permanent and they’re really not.
2:36:23 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:36:25 Gary Oldman: You know, we face some of that now where you think
2:36:28 Gary Oldman: these structures are permanent and they’re going to change.
2:36:31 Gary Oldman: And you also mentioned that the three great, uh,
2:36:35 Gary Oldman: World War II books are The Thin Red Line, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman,
2:36:38 Gary Oldman: and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene.
2:36:42 Gary Oldman: Uh, what makes for a great war book?
2:36:44 Gary Oldman: I think World War II
2:36:49 Gary Oldman: is interesting because it affects everywhere, obviously.
2:36:51 Gary Oldman: And so you can get all these different kinds of stories.
2:36:55 Gary Oldman: And there’s so many good, I was just trying to come up with a range of
2:37:00 Gary Oldman: one American, one British, uh, one Eastern European, uh, just to get,
2:37:01 Gary Oldman: just to get different perspectives.
2:37:05 Gary Oldman: But there’s so many amazing World War II books around all kinds of stories.
2:37:11 Gary Oldman: I think the most complete one, because it is this all of life being there,
2:37:13 Gary Oldman: probably is Life and Fate, which is amazing.
2:37:15 Gary Oldman: And it was, uh, written by Vasily Grossman.
2:37:17 Gary Oldman: He experienced Stalingrad firsthand.
2:37:19 Gary Oldman: And there’s also just a deep flow softball component.
2:37:24 Gary Oldman: And the bit in Treblinka is one of the most harrowing sections of any book
2:37:30 Gary Oldman: I ever read and it really almost more than any other piece of art around the
2:37:34 Gary Oldman: Holocaust made me feel what you would feel like at that moment.
2:37:36 Gary Oldman: And he’s just incredible piece of humanism.
2:37:40 Gary Oldman: And also just, I mean, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
2:37:41 Gary Oldman: Oh yeah.
2:37:46 Gary Oldman: It seems like that context reveals in the most pure way, human nature.
2:37:49 Gary Oldman: And like what kind of, you know, in, uh, Man’s Search for Meaning is
2:37:55 Gary Oldman: when everything is taken from you, you know, the little remains of love
2:38:01 Gary Oldman: for, uh, in this case, his wife is the thing that is a little flame that burns.
2:38:04 Gary Oldman: Uh, let’s say Grossman is
2:38:07 Gary Oldman: small acts of kindness.
2:38:07 Gary Oldman: Mm-hmm.
2:38:11 Gary Oldman: It’s the thing that, uh, allows the human spirit to persist.
2:38:13 Gary Oldman: I love the bit in Life and Fate.
2:38:19 Gary Oldman: When you get, obviously it’s in this Stalinist period and so the, they’re all
2:38:23 Gary Oldman: losing, they all know that the, that what they thought was going to be wonderful
2:38:25 Gary Oldman: about the revolution isn’t going to happen.
2:38:28 Gary Oldman: So there’s a whole, and everyone’s scared of being killed by Stalin because it’s
2:38:29 Gary Oldman: post the purges.
2:38:33 Gary Oldman: But then you get these guys and they’re trapped in a building fighting in
2:38:34 Gary Oldman: Stalingrad.
2:38:37 Gary Oldman: And, uh, so they know at this moment they’re dead anyway.
2:38:43 Gary Oldman: And they get to live like pure, perfect Marxist communists away from Stalin
2:38:44 Gary Oldman: all his nonsense.
2:38:48 Gary Oldman: And I thought that section is incredible because you realize like in some
2:38:54 Gary Oldman: ways in all of its horrors, the most disappointing thing about the 20th
2:38:57 Gary Oldman: century in some ways was the absolute failure of communism.
2:39:01 Gary Oldman: You know, it was because it was such a, you know, quote unquote beautiful
2:39:03 Gary Oldman: idea and it just did not work time and time again.
2:39:08 Gary Oldman: And these people who fought for it and then saw it not working.
2:39:11 Gary Oldman: I think they’re sort of fascinating characters, you know, all of the, all of the
2:39:17 Gary Oldman: revolutionaries from 1917 that were then killed by Stalin, which was all of
2:39:19 Gary Oldman: them apart from him and, him and, him and Lenin.
2:39:23 Gary Oldman: And that was, uh, you know, people in modern day politics talk about
2:39:27 Gary Oldman: communism like it’s trivially, it’s trivial that it would lead to atrocities,
2:39:28 Gary Oldman: but I don’t think it’s that trivial.
2:39:32 Gary Oldman: It’s a, it’s this idealism of human, of humans.
2:39:32 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:39:38 Gary Oldman: It’s like, why, you know, why can’t, basically why can’t we all get along?
2:39:40 Gary Oldman: There’s a real compassion behind it, there’s a real love.
2:39:45 Gary Oldman: And what you realize is there is, it’s a real study, the 20th century of human
2:39:52 Gary Oldman: nature that unfortunately at scale, that kind of compassion, uh, is abused by
2:39:54 Gary Oldman: centralized power.
2:39:59 Gary Oldman: So there’s a dictator always in that context in, in those, given that set of technologies,
2:40:06 Gary Oldman: a dictator arises and does the opposite of what the, the, the promise of the ideal is
2:40:06 Gary Oldman: supposed to be.
2:40:12 Gary Oldman: Well, I think I thought a lot about that then, because I was taught by all these
2:40:16 Gary Oldman: disappointed communists, you know, after 89, all of these English communists,
2:40:19 Gary Oldman: you know, all like having to access, discovering all these atrocities
2:40:22 Gary Oldman: that happened in, you know, so it was always, it always fascinated me.
2:40:24 Gary Oldman: And then you think about
2:40:31 Gary Oldman: complexities or where one’s own values are in the modern moment.
2:40:35 Gary Oldman: I, I say, you know, without, from, from, from E, E, and whether either of them,
2:40:39 Gary Oldman: any, what we would call left now or call right now, does it have any bearing on,
2:40:41 Gary Oldman: on the sort of communist era of those words?
2:40:42 Gary Oldman: And I would say probably not.
2:40:46 Gary Oldman: I think that things have changed, but fundamentally the one value that I would go,
2:40:52 Gary Oldman: I think is worth fighting for is go, whenever either side starts to move towards
2:40:54 Gary Oldman: thought control, move away.
2:40:54 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:40:56 Gary Oldman: That’s never the right outcome.
2:41:01 Gary Oldman: The never right outcome is, oh, you’ve said the wrong thing, you should be removed now.
2:41:04 Gary Oldman: That should never, ever be a thing we should lean towards.
2:41:04 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:41:09 Gary Oldman: It does seem like freedom, individual freedom is a prerequisite.
2:41:10 Gary Oldman: For happiness.
2:41:13 Gary Oldman: For happiness, for, in a flourishing of a larger society.
2:41:13 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:41:16 Gary Oldman: So there’s, like you said, 1984 is pretty, I mean, it’s a caricature.
2:41:17 Gary Oldman: But it is brilliant.
2:41:21 Gary Oldman: It’s quite, it’s actually also just a good story.
2:41:23 Gary Oldman: That’s my criticism of Brave New World.
2:41:25 Gary Oldman: It’s just poorly written.
2:41:29 Gary Oldman: But I like Brave New World probably applies more to the 21st century
2:41:31 Gary Oldman: than does 1984.
2:41:31 Gary Oldman: I don’t know.
2:41:34 Gary Oldman: I think 1984 with the, with the fake wars.
2:41:35 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:41:38 Gary Oldman: And the way that it revealed that everything in it was a setup for him.
2:41:39 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:41:42 Gary Oldman: There’s something, if he could have seen the internet, there’s something,
2:41:47 Gary Oldman: it’s like, it’s like an analog internet, that world they build around the main character.
2:41:50 Gary Oldman: What advice would you give to a young person today?
2:41:57 Gary Oldman: About, let’s say career, how to have a career they can be proud of, how they can
2:41:58 Gary Oldman: have a life to be proud of.
2:42:01 Gary Oldman: You’ve had a non-standard life.
2:42:05 Gary Oldman: I’ve had a lucky life, um, in which I have
2:42:10 Gary Oldman: fought to mess things up and fate has always thrown me a bone.
2:42:14 Gary Oldman: You’ve, uh, traveled in South America and had hobos chase you with machetes.
2:42:15 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:42:16 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:42:17 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:42:18 Gary Oldman: So that happened.
2:42:20 Gary Oldman: That was a series of poor life decisions.
2:42:20 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:42:25 Gary Oldman: Um, and I ran, I ran away, you know, I was, I mean, I ran away to South America.
2:42:26 Gary Oldman: That was a poor decision.
2:42:28 Gary Oldman: I ran away from the guy with the knife.
2:42:30 Gary Oldman: That was a good decision.
2:42:30 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:42:31 Gary Oldman: Uh, I came to America.
2:42:33 Gary Oldman: That was a good decision.
2:42:36 Gary Oldman: Um, I ran, came to LA.
2:42:37 Gary Oldman: That’s, I think, been a good decision.
2:42:42 Gary Oldman: Uh, it’s been fun to see a different side of America and, um, be in a different creative
2:42:43 Gary Oldman: environment.
2:42:49 Gary Oldman: LA is still amazing for creativity and entertainment, the wider entertainment
2:42:49 Gary Oldman: industry stuff.
2:42:51 Gary Oldman: I think that’s been fun.
2:42:53 Gary Oldman: Um, what would I say?
2:42:54 Gary Oldman: I would say
2:43:00 Gary Oldman: when you get a chance, take it.
2:43:02 Gary Oldman: That was one thing I did do well at.
2:43:05 Gary Oldman: When I got chances, I was good at taking them.
2:43:10 Gary Oldman: Um, I would say, do not worry too young about your career.
2:43:14 Gary Oldman: I would say, worry about having a rounded intellectual in a life because you’re
2:43:16 Gary Oldman: going to spend the whole of your life in your own head.
2:43:20 Gary Oldman: So the more interesting you find your own head, the more interesting you find
2:43:24 Gary Oldman: the world, the less you’re going to annoy yourself.
2:43:30 Gary Oldman: So I would say, I would, I would say, do not do a vocational degree as an undergraduate.
2:43:33 Gary Oldman: That’s my, I would say, do something else.
2:43:35 Gary Oldman: Do something, you know, random and then focus afterwards.
2:43:40 Gary Oldman: That would be, I think, uh, I was advocating against the obsession that
2:43:42 Gary Oldman: people had about four years ago with STEM subjects.
2:43:45 Gary Oldman: And now AI is going to make them all irrelevant anyway.
2:43:50 Gary Oldman: So, you know, I, it’s interesting to see everything changes.
2:43:54 Gary Oldman: Jobs are not that hard.
2:43:57 Gary Oldman: You know, turn up, be enthusiastic.
2:44:05 Gary Oldman: Turn up in person, be enthusiastic, uh, help people say you’ll be fine in any job.
2:44:06 Gary Oldman: People is, you know.
2:44:09 Gary Oldman: Did you always know when the chance to take showed up like this is okay.
2:44:10 Gary Oldman: This is interesting.
2:44:10 Gary Oldman: This is new.
2:44:11 Gary Oldman: This is different.
2:44:12 Gary Oldman: Not always.
2:44:16 Gary Oldman: No, but I did the, the big times were the chance to move to America.
2:44:17 Gary Oldman: For me, that was a big moment.
2:44:18 Gary Oldman: My life was a mess.
2:44:19 Gary Oldman: That was weird timing.
2:44:25 Gary Oldman: So I, I read that, uh, Sam wrote you an email in South America.
2:44:31 Gary Oldman: I literally, I was in South America, in Columbia when there was a war raging there.
2:44:31 Gary Oldman: Yep.
2:44:38 Gary Oldman: I was making a series of very poor life choices and a lack of life skills, age 25.
2:44:44 Gary Oldman: Um, my latest poor choice was to get up too early because the police didn’t
2:44:47 start work till nine, but the muggers started at eight.
2:44:50 Gary Oldman: And so I was out, uh, walking along the beach at eight.
2:44:55 Gary Oldman: Uh, and these, uh, guys, this raster, uh, turned
2:44:57 Gary Oldman: up who I’d been talking to the day before was like trying to talk to me.
2:45:03 Gary Oldman: And then two guys came up to talk to him and I couldn’t tell if they were trying
2:45:06 Gary Oldman: to mug him because he owed the money or he’d bought me to them.
2:45:09 Gary Oldman: But I did notice one of them had a machete and another had a kind of broken gun.
2:45:12 Gary Oldman: So I thought this is not good.
2:45:18 Gary Oldman: And I ran off sprinted down the beach in my, in my, uh, silly shoes and, uh,
2:45:22 Gary Oldman: got to the chance once in my life to run over to a road, run, jump into a taxi
2:45:24 Gary Oldman: and scream, you know, take me anywhere.
2:45:25 Gary Oldman: I feel like I’m an action movie.
2:45:28 Gary Oldman: And the guy’s chasing after the machete.
2:45:30 Gary Oldman: And the taxi driver looks back, sees the dude with the machete and goes,
2:45:32 Gary Oldman: “Sí, con amigos.”
2:45:33 Gary Oldman: And I’m like, no, no, no, they’re not my friends.
2:45:35 Gary Oldman: Get me out of here.
2:45:39 Gary Oldman: And then I, um, he drove me up the street into a bit where the town was.
2:45:42 Gary Oldman: Um, it’s kind of between the old town and the new town in Cartagena.
2:45:47 Gary Oldman: And, um, I got out of the car and then cut my foot on a rock.
2:45:49 Gary Oldman: That was the sum total of my injuries.
2:45:53 Gary Oldman: And, um, then went to an internet cafe because this was probably late 98 and got
2:45:58 Gary Oldman: the chance to come and work on a game for six weeks in New York.
2:46:01 Gary Oldman: And I was like, well, if I stay in South America much longer, I’m going to
2:46:04 Gary Oldman: get myself killed because this was, I was getting into silly stuff.
2:46:08 Gary Oldman: Um, and so I went to New York and they’ve
2:46:09 Gary Oldman: just started in Rockstar.
2:46:13 Gary Oldman: And so I got to sort of write the mission statements and what not there
2:46:17 Gary Oldman: and help set the tone for that and just ended up staying.
2:46:19 Gary Oldman: You know, I had to come and go a bit.
2:46:22 Gary Oldman: Well, the visas got sorted out and then just ended up staying
2:46:25 Gary Oldman: for a year because New York’s pretty fun.
2:46:27 Gary Oldman: It actually was not that, this was the height of
2:46:30 Gary Oldman: Giuliani before he was a maniac.
2:46:35 Gary Oldman: Um, so he, uh, you couldn’t, when you went to bars,
2:46:37 Gary Oldman: you’re told you couldn’t dance because they were trying to clamp down on New
2:46:38 Gary Oldman: York being fun.
2:46:41 Gary Oldman: So it was actually less fun than London, but there’s still a great energy in
2:46:47 Gary Oldman: New York and got exposed to the kind of madness of New York capitalism.
2:46:49 Gary Oldman: By the way, as we hear sirens in the background,
2:46:50 Gary Oldman: that always makes me think of New York.
2:46:51 Gary Oldman: Yeah, of course.
2:46:52 Gary Oldman: Whenever I’m in New York, there’s always sirens.
2:46:55 Gary Oldman: Steam coming out the floor, people screaming at you.
2:46:57 Gary Oldman: I mean, you get people screaming at you in LA at least.
2:46:58 Gary Oldman: Yeah, but it’s more distributed.
2:46:59 Gary Oldman: It’s more spread out.
2:47:01 Gary Oldman: You get a bit more quiet here.
2:47:02 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:47:04 Gary Oldman: Um, and I love the energy.
2:47:07 Gary Oldman: You know, it was great to work hard and then be able to go out for dinner late.
2:47:11 Gary Oldman: And, and New York was really, really a fun experience for me.
2:47:13 Gary Oldman: You work with your brother, Sam, for many years.
2:47:20 Gary Oldman: Uh, what do you admire about him as a creative mind, as a human being?
2:47:23 Gary Oldman: His drive and his
2:47:31 Gary Oldman: vision, uh, early on to see what video games could become.
2:47:35 Gary Oldman: He was the one who understood that video games were the next big thing.
2:47:40 Gary Oldman: And I think that was, uh, you know, people would laugh in our face about that in
2:47:40 Gary Oldman: those days.
2:47:44 Gary Oldman: And so to have someone that was strong and saying, no, no, we stick to the state of the
2:47:48 Gary Oldman: course and then having the confidence to push through with these big projects.
2:47:50 Gary Oldman: Are you excited for the future of video games?
2:47:55 Gary Oldman: Yeah, I think I completely, I still, I still look at,
2:48:01 Gary Oldman: I’m glad you’ve spoken so, I mean, you’ve spoken so kindly about our work,
2:48:05 Gary Oldman: about the stuff that I did and the stuff the whole teams did.
2:48:06 Gary Oldman: It’s wonderful.
2:48:09 Gary Oldman: But I just look at it and see problems and see things that we can make do better.
2:48:14 Gary Oldman: You know, I think, uh, it was always each, try each time to do it better.
2:48:16 Gary Oldman: And I’ve got, you know, some of the stuff we’re working on now
2:48:19 Gary Oldman: is going to do stuff that people haven’t really seen before.
2:48:25 Gary Oldman: Uh, and I think it’s just, I think the games can get so much better.
2:48:26 Gary Oldman: They can feel so much more alive.
2:48:30 Gary Oldman: They can be better at storytelling and feel more alive and feel like, you know,
2:48:35 Gary Oldman: their systems, all the stuff, the component parts we talked about, you can,
2:48:38 Gary Oldman: we can both make each of those parts better and tie them together better.
2:48:40 Gary Oldman: I think it’s the technology is all it to me.
2:48:41 Gary Oldman: It still feels like it’s only just beginning.
2:48:45 Gary Oldman: You know, it’s been, it’s been cinema evolved from like
2:48:53 Gary Oldman: 1900, 1895, whenever it was until invented talking in 1930 or whenever that was.
2:48:54 Gary Oldman: It’s not that.
2:48:56 Gary Oldman: And then it’s kind of found its modern form.
2:48:58 Gary Oldman: And then by 39, they’re shooting in color.
2:49:02 Gary Oldman: And that’s basically a modern film is no different from a 1939 film.
2:49:06 Gary Oldman: But with games, I still think we’ve got a long way to go.
2:49:09 Gary Oldman: The tech, there’s so many different parts of the tech that it’s still got a long way to
2:49:11 Gary Oldman: to go and you can go in all different fun directions.
2:49:18 Gary Oldman: I just wish, I know you said video games take a lot less than they possibly they could,
2:49:19 Gary Oldman: but I just wish it was faster.
2:49:23 Gary Oldman: Like you’ve already made me fall in love with Absurdiverse and you’ve made me fall
2:49:25 Gary Oldman: in love with the better paradise.
2:49:28 Gary Oldman: And now I am going to sit depressed to realize I’m going to have to wait.
2:49:31 Gary Oldman: I go, of course, read.
2:49:36 Gary Oldman: We should have some little short cartoons coming out in a while for Absurdiverse and more
2:49:41 Gary Oldman: stuff coming in the next period, but yeah, it just takes, it takes a little bit of time.
2:49:46 Gary Oldman: And I think, I mean, movies, you big movies are four years plus from start to end.
2:49:46 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:49:50 Gary Oldman: You know, all the legal stuff at the start, you know, will be about the same.
2:49:54 Gary Oldman: Yeah. And certain movies from idea to completion, I mean, take 10 plus years.
2:50:00 Gary Oldman: A lot of that’s just that development process that is really sometimes feels like
2:50:01 Gary Oldman: it’s designed to not make stuff.
2:50:05 Gary Oldman: A bit more of a specific advice, but on the topic of video games,
2:50:10 Gary Oldman: what advice would you give to, uh, to maybe independent video game creators
2:50:14 Gary Oldman: that are dreaming of creating great games.
2:50:16 Gary Oldman: They’re inspired by Red Dead.
2:50:20 Gary Oldman: They’re inspiring of all the incredible open worlds and narratives you’ve created.
2:50:24 Gary Oldman: Like, how’s it possible to have a chance of doing something like that?
2:50:26 Gary Oldman: I mean, it’s part of the two, two ways.
2:50:31 Gary Oldman: Try and do it cheaply for, with yourself in a small group or join a company that you
2:50:33 Gary Oldman: think is doing it the right way.
2:50:35 Gary Oldman: You know, and I think there’s upsides to either of those.
2:50:38 Gary Oldman: I think if you want to make something that’s cinematic,
2:50:41 Gary Oldman: AI is going to change some of this.
2:50:42 Gary Oldman: But if you want to make something that’s cinematic,
2:50:43 Gary Oldman: you need resources.
2:50:47 Gary Oldman: You can still make something that’s really interesting that isn’t super cinematic,
2:50:49 Gary Oldman: but it’s an interesting experience in some ways.
2:50:51 Gary Oldman: But the second you’re involving actors and motion capture,
2:50:54 Gary Oldman: one of those big experiences, it’s going to cost some money.
2:50:58 Gary Oldman: So therefore, if you want to do that, you’ve got to figure out what companies
2:51:00 Gary Oldman: you want to work out and figure out how you get to work there.
2:51:04 Gary Oldman: Do you have hope for AI helping with some of the video,
2:51:08 Gary Oldman: some of the video generation, some of the world generation,
2:51:13 Gary Oldman: some of the open world assistance in generating the world?
2:51:15 Gary Oldman: Yes, limited.
2:51:16 Gary Oldman: Absolutely.
2:51:19 Gary Oldman: If used correctly, it will be a great tool.
2:51:22 Gary Oldman: If used incorrectly, it will lead to loads of generic stuff.
2:51:23 Gary Oldman: Yeah.
2:51:27 Gary Oldman: You know, I’ve been in games for 29 years, and all the time,
2:51:30 Gary Oldman: the piece of tech that’s going to make making games much easier and much cheaper
2:51:31 Gary Oldman: is about to turn up.
2:51:34 Gary Oldman: And all that’s happened is the games have got much better and way more expensive.
2:51:39 Gary Oldman: So I’m always nervous about saying, finally, we have that bit of tech that makes
2:51:40 Gary Oldman: our lives easier.
2:51:43 Gary Oldman: But it looks as if it might be able to do that when you use it in the right way.
2:51:48 Gary Oldman: If you use it to try and as a substitute for creativity, it’s going to be really generic.
2:51:49 Gary Oldman: A big, ridiculous question.
2:51:53 Gary Oldman: What’s the meaning of this whole thing we have going on here?
2:51:56 Gary Oldman: Of life, of existence. Why are we here?
2:51:59 Gary Oldman: To watch the universe.
2:52:05 Gary Oldman: The easiest, plausible answer is we are designed by the universe to watch itself
2:52:07 Gary Oldman: And to comment on it in interesting ways.
2:52:10 Gary Oldman: Consistently more and more interesting ways, yeah.
2:52:14 Gary Oldman: What role does love play as part of that?
2:52:19 Gary Oldman: It’s the only thing that makes it possibly worth doing.
2:52:25 Gary Oldman: Everything material is irrelevant. So the only things of value are these immaterial
2:52:31 things. You know, I do think metaphysics always trumps physics for me.
2:52:36 Gary Oldman: Well, Dan, from the bottom of my heart, speaking of love, thank you.
2:52:38 Gary Oldman: What a pleasure. Thank you, man.
2:52:42 Gary Oldman: Thank you for everything you’ve created in this world. Me and millions of die-hard
2:52:47 fans of your games are forever grateful. I know there’s a lot of people that would like to say
2:52:49 thank you to you. Gary Oldman: Just to be clear, because I always
2:52:55 like to make this very clear, it was never me. It was always me sat alongside people with actual real
2:53:00 talent who did amazing things. Gary Oldman: Well, I hope you keep being self-critical and
2:53:08 creating awesome stuff in the world. And we can’t wait to keep exploring the worlds you create.
2:53:10 Gary Oldman: And thank you so much for talking today, brother.
2:53:11 Gary Oldman: Thank you for having me. What a privilege.
2:53:15 Gary Oldman: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Hauser. To support this
2:53:18 Gary Oldman: podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description,
2:53:24 Gary Oldman: where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.
2:53:28 Gary Oldman: And now, let me leave you some words from Ernest Hemingway,
2:53:31 Gary Oldman: one of Dan’s and my favorite writers.
2:53:37 Gary Oldman: The world breaks everyone. And afterward, many are strong
2:53:39 Gary Oldman: at the broken places.
2:53:56 Gary Oldman: Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
2:53:56 you