[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.

[Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story.

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's On Story, "A Beautiful Mind" screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman.

- The journey is, how do you embrace the good?

And I think you have to be self-aware or at least curious.

Curious about self.

And so I write about characters who I think are curious about self or who are always haunted.

Who are always dragged down by something they're trying to overcome.

Those are the stories that interest me because they are fractals of my experience.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, Academy Award winning screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman discusses his work on "A Beautiful Mind," "A Time To Kill" and "Titans."

And using personal experience and self-exploration to develop character.

- I think I read that you had started out trying to write fiction.

But the first screenplay you wrote, you sold.

And, so I'm just interested in, what do you think worked for you more in the process of writing a screenplay, than was working for you in fiction?

- I always wanted to be a writer.

So undergraduate and then graduate school.

I went to Wesleyan and then I went to NYU in the graduate fiction program.

And I had the most extraordinary teachers.

I had Russell Banks and Margaret Atwood.

I just couldn't manage it.

I just couldn't find my way out of a short story.

I could get into them, but I just somehow could never exit the narrative.

At a certain point I sort of thought to myself, "Well, maybe screenplay is easier."

And then I did this thing that, some people find controversial, which is the Robert McKee course.

And I swear by him.

Because unlike fiction, screenplay has predictable structure.

It's more like a theatrical play.

There are acts, those acts are predictable.

There are cycles of rising and falling action.

All the things we've all heard, those things are true.

So that's the long way around to the answer.

What I learned in fiction was how to write a good sentence.

Which I really think matters.

I think people underestimate the need for a good sentence.

Especially when screenplays are being read and assessed for the first time.

I think in that form, a good sentence is as important in screenplay as it is in a novel or even a poem.

- Can you give me an example of what you mean by a good sentence?

- Sure.

A good sentence has sound.

A good sentence is a sentence that beguiles you.

A good sentence can be poetic.

It can be like Shane Black's description in "The Last Boy Scout" where he's describing a messy room.

And he says, "Throw everything you own from a plane.

It will land like this."

It's brilliant.

That's a good sentence.

It draws you in.

It ignites your imagination.

It engages the reader which you have to do before you ever get a chance to engage the viewer.

- So you sell this first screenplay.

You have successes with some adaptations of John Grisham.

You then jump into this highly publicized franchise, "Batman Forever" and "Batman Robin."

Those obviously inspire a lot of criticism for many reasons beyond you, right?

Like you're on a creative team here.

There's decisions being made.

How did that inform the next steps for you?

- I think my whole career has been peaks and valleys.

You know, um, uh, I used to, when I was younger imagined that that was somehow not the career that I wanted.

I wanted the career where it all just worked.

And then I started trying to understand where that career was and realized it was an imagined career.

It was not an actual life.

I was a storybook version of a world where there was no learning.

I'm old enough.

That we weren't trained the way my kids are to take failure as something to learn from.

We took it as an indictment.

We [bleep].

So what happened with me was, the client was popped out of the box.

First thing on the floor, the movie.

Working very closely with many amazing people.

Because Joel Schumacher sort of took me under his wing.

So I'm sort of building the character with Susan Sarandon.

She gets nominated for the Oscar.

The movies gets great.

Tommy Lee Jones.

Who's just like, "Oh my God."

Then "Batman Forever."

Which people really like.

And by the way, "Batman Forever" is sort of still has a renaissance coming.

I really am interested to see whether the original cut of "Batman Forever" comes out because I got to see it recently.

The first one.

Which was referred to as Preview Cut One.

And it was really dark.

It was a pretty psychological exploration of guilt and shame.

- Master Bruce.

Master Bruce.

- Just like my parents.

It's happening again.

Monster comes out of the night, a scream, two shots.

I kill them.

- What did you say?

- He killed them, Two Face.

He slaughtered that boy's parents?

- No.

No, you said I. I killed him.

[dramatic music] - I find that there's a lot of psychological underpinnings in the things that I find myself wanting to live in and around.

And then "Time to Kill," which was an extraordinary event in my life.

And I still have friends from the making of that movie.

And then "Batman and Robin."

Which could not have crashed and burned more spectacularly.

We were sort of at a funny time in superhero movies.

Because psychological naturalism, hadn't, it hadn't quite...

The folks were still scared of comic book movies.

It still needed to be, you know, Warner Brothers owned the graphic novel, "Dark Knight Returns."

All that time when they had Clint Eastwood under a deal and nobody ever made it.

Because the idea of sort of like Unforgiven with Batman, wasn't going to happen.

Even though the comics were doing it, you know, in a way that was fulsome.

I think that what happened was there was a lot of desire for "Batman and Robin" to make a zillion dollars.

And so that movie sort of...

It kind of wandered away from, I think, what anybody wanted.

I used to say that most of that movie, any movie, but that movie it's sort of like painting by lightning on the side of a building.

Like every flash you paint a little bit.

And then the sun rises and you're like either, "Huh?"

or like, "Ooh."

Those are the kind of things that in my career have tended to push me towards reaching in and becoming quite personal.

Sometimes that will work.

Sometimes it won't.

But I think you have to be self-aware or at least curious.

Curious about self.

And so I write about characters who I think are curious about self or who are always haunted.

Who are always dragged down by something they're trying to overcome.

Those are the stories that interest me because they are fractals of my experience.

[typewriter ding] - Let's spend a little bit of time on "A Beautiful Mind."

You said that you really went after that project.

Even before the book actually hit the stands, you had already managed to read it and be chasing it down.

I'm really interested in what...

Especially now, after hearing that you're always exploring guilt and shame.

That what is it about that story that so affected you personally.

And to the degree that you thought you could really attract us as an audience to that man story.

- One of the very first group homes for what was then for those children who were then referred to as emotionally disturbed was in my house.

My parents founded it.

Both my parents were child psychologists.

And so in my mother's early writings, which are often case histories, there was frequently someone hanging the baby out the window or banging the baby against the wall.

I was the baby.

So I grew up in this world where there was no actual delineation between sane and mad.

All my peers in my house in Brooklyn Heights were, uh, you know, seeing floating things up windows, imaginary horses.

Or talking to people who weren't there.

I actually had no idea for quite a while that that was atypical.

So as I got older and I started to share a less labile and more conventional view of normal, I felt very much that when people looked at what was called madness, they looked at it across a transom.

And that in fact, they were misunderstanding the experience of the person who is suffering.

Because to somebody who is seeing a world that is different than yours, they're not mad.

They're doing exactly what they need to do to navigate in an environment that is visceral, tactile, reinforcing, or threatening to them.

They live in a reality which is different from yours.

But their reactions are quite sane once you understand that reality.

So "A Beautiful Mind" became an opportunity for me to take that view of, you know, this kind of disorder and pair it with a real life.

It was a very unique circumstance.

John Nash allowed Sylvia Nasser to write his biography, but he didn't really participate.

So if you read the book, which is brilliant.

It's a perfectly crafted view of the outside of his life.

But his inner life is absent because Sylvia's a biographer and she wasn't going to make it up.

I am not a biographer.

I'm a storyteller.

So I just made it up.

I created characters based in incidents that happened in Sylvia's book.

That I interpolated.

That I created in order to give him an internal landscape.

[buzzer rings] [soft dramatic music] - Charles?

Charles?

I need to get you involved in this.

I'm sorry.

[dramatic music] Charles?

[dramatic music] - And when it was wrenched away, there were harmonics with what it would feel like for the sufferer.

So it was sort of an engine for empathy.

I think that's what I was trying to do.

I'm always trying to kind of do paradigm shifts in that way.

I always say that the moment in Beautiful Mind where, have his, his cohort turns out not to be real.

Is actually no different from the moment in Sam-- in "Deep Blue Sea" where Sam Jackson gets eaten by the shark while he's making the speech.

It was a movie I produced just before.

It's just different genres.

You know what I mean?

You think you know where it's going and then ya, ya turn it around.

- How did you decide to present John Nash's delusions as real people at first?

What was the seed for that?

- Again I think for me, the seed was not really believing that anybody who suffers from what we call madness is mad.

That the experience of somebody who has schizophrenia is hard to understand outside of it because what people see is somebody who understands that there's another person who believes their dog is talking to them.

The illness isn't just that.

It's also the fact that your mind tells you it's reasonable that your dog is talking to you.

Right.

Much as schizophrenia their hallucinations are much more auditory than visual.

What I was actually trying to do is approximate the experience, right?

Simulate.

It's not really what schizophrenia feels like, but I can't make the audience think it's okay when the dog talks, right.

If the dog talks, the audience goes, "Oh, that person's crazy."

Right.

So what I really wanted was the audience to be in the plight of, in the experience with John Nash.

So in order to do that, I created intact visual hallucinations, which is actually sort of not symptomatically accurate.

- Hey.

Bye-bye.

- Bye now.

- I'd really be interested in hearing how you and Ron Howard talked about incorporating that whole espionage piece into it.

- "A Beautiful Mind" is a genre.

Right?

It's a mental health movie, but it's also a genre movie.

And it switches back and forth.

Ron and I...

I mean, the thing that we couldn't stop talking about was would they, when it stopped being an espionage movie, would they care?

Would we actually have broken their hearts to the point where they were like "[bleep] these guys, I don't want to watch the rest of this.

I was really interested in what the spy story was going to be."

And we were always talking about how long could we accordion out the section of mental health after now.

It turned out, and I think this is really a tribute to Ron and to Russell, that people were quite engaged when it flipped.

That in fact, they went with us also on the idea that that was to get them there.

And they had so connected to Russell's portrayal of John.

That they weren't letting him go.

Even if he wasn't really a spy.

And that was the outcome.

- There is no William Parcher.

- Of course there is, if it wasn't for-- - Doing what?

Breaking codes?

Dropping packages in a secret mailbox for the government to pick up?

- How could you know that?

- Sol followed you.

He thought it was harmless.

- Sol followed me.

They've never been opened.

It isn't real.

There's no conspiracy John.

There is no William Parcher.

- If you'd written John Nash, more like John Nash, do you think people would have responded to that John Nash?

- Well, no.

Because John Nash as John Nash, is Russell in the third act.

That's who he is.

And so if you do not know what you're looking at, that can be off-putting to some civilians.

And again, all I wanted was to do the opposite.

So I created the John Nash that existed in John Nash's mind.

- So what's your story?

You the poor kid that never got to go to Exeter or Andover?

- Despite my privileged upbringing, I'm actually quite well-balanced.

I have a chip on both shoulders.

[Akiva] He wasn't good with other people.

But he has this amazingly gorgeous, charming, British best friend.

Right?

And that's why you like him, because Paul likes him.

They were all tricks to do exactly what you just said which is make us like somebody who, if you just saw him from the outside, if not likable, certainly wouldn't seem approachable.

[typewriter ding] - I also read something that you wrote about breaking the back of a story before you can proceed putting words on paper.

It's interesting that that's the perspective when you're adapting other people's work, right.

So there's already usually a spine there.

And so I'm interested in hearing how you approach that.

Then like when you take on something like that, and as a person who likes to smush, like what-- how does this work?

- It's a translation.

It's not a literal retelling.

So I think "A Time to Kill" is an interesting version of that because the story of "A Time to Kill" is similar, if not the same to the movie.

But the conversion.

The change of perspective.

Where the jury suddenly puts themselves in the place of the Sam's character and this horrible thing that happens to his daughter.

And what a father would do in response to that.

That is all there.

But it all happens off stage.

And so the movie wants to, in my opinion, not tell the story as much as bring the viewer along in the story.

Movie time is different than story, than fiction.

Right.

Than written time.

The amount of time you spend reading a book is so different than the amount of time you spend watching.

So I wrote a summation for Matthew who was a brand new actor.

And I was basically a brand new writer.

And it was nine pages long.

And everybody went, you know you can't do that.

And I went, "Oh," and Matthew went, "Oh."

And then he did it.

I think he did it in one take.

Or at least-- which there, it's two.

At most it's two.

And everybody just went, "Okay, we're done now."

- This is a story about a little girl.

Walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon.

I want you to picture this little girl.

Suddenly a truck races up.

Two men jump out and grab her.

And drag her into a nearby field.

And they tie her up.

And they rip her clothes from her body.

Now they climb on.

First one then the other.

Raping her.

Shattering everything innocent and pure.

- It was all the story of the book.

But it was a different delivery system.

Was a filmic delivery system.

If John Grisham had had Matthew, he might've done that too.

[typewriter ding] - So "Titans," this incredibly complicated maturing group of people desperately trying to avoid responsibility or own responsibility.

Or whatever point they are in that journey is really interesting to me.

And there's just kind of a sadness in their self-discovery that I just find also very attractive.

I'm very interested in what you saw in that DC Universe product that you felt you could bring your intent to.

You seem to have an intent in your writing.

So.

- For me the idea of adolescence and superheroes, well, that's great, right?

Because adolescence is about how do you take on power and what do you do with it?

[grunting] - What do you think you are doing?

They're cops.

- That's the coolest part about being Robin.

Wearing a mask.

I can do whatever [bleep] I want.

- Did you not just hear what I said?

There's no way Batman's cool with beating up cops.

- He isn't.

I don't see him here.

The cops in Gotham kicked my ass every night.

Now I get to kick back.

- You obviously have your own [bleep] going on.

You're going to wake up one day and have no idea who you are.

- Coming from the guy screaming, "I'm not Robin.

I don't want to be Robin."

Standing there in a [bleep] Robin suit.

Carrying that case all over the country.

You want to know the real difference between us.

I know who I am man.

I kick with ass with Batman, and I [bleep] love it.

Who the [bleep] are you?

- My old friend, Joel Schumacher used to say, "Money gives you the excuse to be exactly who you are."

So do superpowers I think.

As seen in everything from "Spider-Man" to "Chronicle" and back.

These are kids who are struggling with what to do?

Who to be.

How to manage opportunity.

And for me, it was also a little bit of an apology tour for "Batman and Robin."

It's the antithesis of it.

- Why do you feel like you have to apologize for "Batman and Robin?"

- Oh, I don't any more, but I did.

I am not someone who writes movies and then hands them off.

I have been on set of almost everything almost every day.

So when a thing doesn't work, it's really painful.

You put two years of your life into a thing.

And it doesn't work and that's okay, but it doesn't go away.

It's part of what you carry with you.

And so if you can sort of reshape it, if I can add another color to it, even over time, that delights me.

- I do want to back up a little bit and talk about Dove and Hawk.

Because I am very attracted to those two people the way you have portrayed them.

They're very magnetic.

And because they're so, they're not just complicated, they're antithesis of each piece of their mind.

- Greg Walker, who's the show runner and Jeff Johns and myself, I think we all have our particular favorites.

Mine too are Hawk and Dove.

I find them to be so beautifully broken.

I think Alan and Minkah do this thing on screen together that's so real and complicated.

- We became Hawk and Dove to deal with pain.

Our pain.

And it worked.

But then it wasn't enough for you.

And you found other ways.

- You are wrong.

- Am I?

That's why I went alone so that you wouldn't risk a relapse.

- Oh, I see.

So you were doing me a favor sneaking out behind my back like that.

- Maybe I was.

- [Bleep] Dove, you were in a coma for a month.

You got to sleep through it.

But I didn't.

I had to sit by your side wondering if you were going to die every [bleep] day.

Being Hawk and Dove was dangerous for both of us.

I stopped.

But if you can't, we're done.

- Their dynamic, their damage, really, was the story that I found to be the most dangerous because it was the most unexpected.

And also because they're not leads.

They could die at any time.

And so all that to me was-- was a fun place to get to go.

[typewriter ding] - You've been watching a conversation with Akiva Goldsman on On Story.

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project.

That also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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