A Curious Mind Read online

  Curiosity does something else for me: it helps me cut through the routine anxiety of work and life.

  I worry, for instance, about becoming complacent—I worry that out here in Hollywood, I’ll end up in a bubble isolated from what’s going on in the rest of the world, from how it’s changing and evolving. I use curiosity to pop the bubble, to keep complacency at bay.

  I also worry about much more ordinary things—I worry about giving speeches; I worry about the safety of my kids; I even worry about the police—police officers make me nervous. I use curiosity when I’m worried about something. If you understand what kind of speech someone wants you to give, if you understand how cops think, you’ll either see your fear dissipate, or you’ll be able to handle it.

  I use curiosity as a management tool.

  I use it to help me be outgoing.

  I use curiosity to power my self-confidence.

  I use it to avoid getting into a rut, and I use it to manage my own worries.

  In the coming chapters, I’m going to analyze and tell stories about these different types of curiosity, because I think they can be useful to almost anyone.

  And that is the most important way I use curiosity: I use it to tell stories. That, really, is my profession. My job as a producer is to look for good stories to tell, and I need people to write those stories, to act in them, to direct them. I’m looking for the money to get those stories made, and for ideas about how to sell the finished stories to the public. But, for me, the key to all these elements is the story itself.

  Here’s one of the secrets of life in Hollywood—a secret you learn in ninth-grade English class, but that many people forget. There are only a few kinds of stories in the world: romance, quest, tragedy, comedy. We’ve been telling stories for 4,000 years. Every story has been told.

  And yet here I sit in the middle of a business devoted to either finding new stories, or taking old stories and telling them in fresh ways, with fresh characters.

  Good storytelling requires creativity and originality; it requires a real spark of inspiration. Where does the spark come from? I think curiosity is the flint from which flies the spark of inspiration.

  In fact, storytelling and curiosity are natural allies. Curiosity is what drives human beings out into the world every day, to ask questions about what’s going on around them, about people and why they behave the way they do. Storytelling is the act of bringing home the discoveries learned from curiosity. The story is a report from the front lines of curiosity.

  Storytelling gives us the ability to tell everyone else what we’ve learned—or to tell everyone the story of our adventure, or about the adventures of the people we’ve met. Likewise, nothing sparks curiosity like good storytelling. Curiosity drives the desire to keep reading the book you can’t put down, it’s the desire to know how much of a movie you’ve just seen is true.

  Curiosity and storytelling are intertwined. They give each other power.

  What makes a story fresh is the point of view of the person telling it.

  I produced a movie called Splash, about what happens when a man falls in love with a mermaid.

  I produced a movie called Apollo 13, the true story of what happens when three U.S. astronauts get trapped in their crippled spaceship.

  I produced a movie called 8 Mile, about trying to be a white rap musician in the black rap world of Detroit.

  I produced a movie called American Gangster, about a heroin smuggler in Vietnam-era New York.

  American Gangster isn’t about a gangster—it’s about capability, it’s about talent and determination.

  8 Mile isn’t about rap music, it isn’t even about race—it’s about surmounting humiliation, about respect, about being an outsider.

  Apollo 13 isn’t about aeronautics—it’s about resourcefulness, about putting aside panic in the name of survival.

  And Splash, of course, isn’t about mermaids—only a thousand people in Hollywood told me we couldn’t make a movie about mermaids. Splash is about love, about finding the right love for yourself, as opposed to the love others would choose for you.

  I don’t want to make movies about alluring mermaids or courageous astronauts, about brazen drug smugglers or struggling musicians. At least, I don’t want to make predictable movies about only those things.

  I don’t want to tell stories where the “excitement” comes from explosions or special effects or sex scenes.

  I want to tell the very best stories I can, stories that are memorable, that resonate, that make the audience think, that sometimes make people see their own lives differently. And to find those stories, to get to inspiration, to find that spark of creativity, what I do is ask questions.

  What kind of story is it? Is it a comedy? A myth? An adventure?

  What’s the right tone for this story?

  Why are the characters in this story in trouble?

  What connects the characters in this story to each other?

  What makes this story emotionally satisfying?

  Who is telling this story, and what is that person’s point of view? What is his challenge? What is her dream?

  And most important, what is this story about? The plot is what happens in the story, but that plot is not what the story is about.

  I don’t think I’d be very good at my job if I weren’t curious. I think I’d be making movies that weren’t very good.

  I keep asking questions until something interesting happens. My talent is to know enough to ask the questions, and to know when something interesting happens.

  What I think is so exciting about curiosity is that it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what your job is, or what your passion is. Curiosity works the same way for all of us—if we use it well.

  You don’t have to be Thomas Edison. You don’t have to be Steve Jobs. You don’t have to be Steven Spielberg. But you can be “creative” and “innovative” and “compelling” and “original”—because you can be curious.

  Curiosity doesn’t only help you solve problems—no matter what those problems are. There’s a bonus: curiosity is free. You don’t need a training course. You don’t need special equipment or expensive clothing, you don’t need a smartphone or a high-speed Internet connection, you don’t need the full set of the Encyclopædia Britannica (which I was always a little sad I didn’t have).

  You’re born curious, and no matter how much battering your curiosity has taken, it’s standing by, ready to be awakened.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Police Chief, the Movie Mogul, and the Father of the H-Bomb: Thinking Like Other People

  * * *

  “Curiosity . . . is insubordination in its purest form.”

  —Vladimir Nabokov1

  THE POLICE OFFICERS ASKED ME to lower my pants. That’s when I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

  It was April 30, 1992, and I was standing inside Parker Center, the distinctive downtown LA building that was then headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department. I had been working for months to get to this spot—to meet Daryl Gates, the legendary chief of the LAPD, a man renowned for inventing the modern police SWAT unit, and for showing big-city police departments across the country how to function more like paramilitary units.

  In Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s, no one wielded power like Chief Gates. I was fascinated by that power, and by the personality that was able to accumulate it and use it. This type of influence is completely alien to me. I don’t see the world as a hierarchy—as a chain of command. I don’t want control over hundreds of people, I don’t see life, or work, as an opportunity to build up power and exercise it. I don’t particularly like giving orders, or seeing whether people have enough respect for me, or fear of me, to obey those orders. But the world is filled with people maneuvering for power—in fact, the typical workplace is filled with people like that, and we probably need them.

  As much as I’m fascinated by that kind of power, I’m also wary of it. I do want to understa
nd that kind of personality, as a storyteller and also as a citizen. Chief Gates made a great curiosity conversation—the perfect example of a certain kind of autocratic mind-set, right in my own city.

  I tried for many months to get on Gates’s calendar—working my way through an assistant, a secretary, one cop, another cop. Finally, in early 1992, his office gave me an appointment to have lunch with Chief Gates—four months into the future.

  And then, on April 29, 1992, the day before my lunch, the four LA police officers who had been caught on videotape beating Rodney King were acquitted of the charges against them, and rioting started across Los Angeles.

  I got up that Thursday morning—April 30—and the rioting had gone on all night, with buildings being burned and neighborhoods being looted. Suddenly, it was the most chaotic moment in Los Angeles in thirty years, since the Watts riots in 1965. The Los Angeles Police Department was at the center of the chaos—it was the reason for it, and also responsible for stopping it. Chief Gates completely embodied the militaristic approach that led to the Rodney King beating in the first place.

  I thought for sure Gates would have enough to handle that morning and that our lunch would certainly be canceled. But no—lunch was a go.

  When I got to Parker Center, it was locked down. There were concrete barriers out front, and a line of police officers, and a series of checkpoints to get into the building. They asked, “Who are you going to see?” And I answered, “Chief Daryl Gates.”

  I produced my ID. In the lobby there was another line of cops. A couple of them patted me down. They asked me to lower my pants. Being searched to my underwear by two uniformed LAPD officers did nothing to reduce my wariness of the police, but I wanted to see Daryl Gates; I’d been trying to see him for more than a year. With my pants pulled back up, I was escorted onto the elevator by a pair of officers who rode up to the sixth floor with me.

  Parker Center vibrated with energy. Although the building was populated by the people we rely on to be cool in a crisis, it felt like everyone was a little freaked out.

  I arrived at Chief Gates’s suite—an outer room and his office. Everyone around me was in uniform, including the chief. He was sitting at an ordinary, utilitarian conference table in his office, surrounded by wooden chairs resembling schoolroom chairs, with arms. He was seated on one side, and I took a seat at the end.

  Chief Gates seemed totally relaxed. Downstairs, the city was burning, exploding. That very afternoon, the mayor would impose a state of emergency and a curfew and call out the National Guard; the next night, President George H. W. Bush would give a televised, prime-time speech to the nation about the LA riots.2

  But Daryl Gates was calm.

  He greeted me. “What would you like for lunch?” he asked. I was so nervous, I didn’t quite know what to say. “What are you having, sir?” I asked.

  “I’m having a tuna sandwich,” Gates said.

  “I’ll have what you’re having.” A few minutes later, an aide delivered two tuna sandwiches with potato chips on the side.

  We chatted while eating our tuna and chips. Or Chief Gates was eating, at least. I couldn’t take more than a few polite bites of my sandwich.

  As we sat there, Gates’s chief lieutenant suddenly burst into the office, totally adrenalized, shouting, “Boss! Boss! You’re on TV again right now, the city council says you’re out, they say they are firing you!”

  Gates turned to me. He didn’t flinch. Nothing in his biochemistry changed at all. He appeared totally calm.

  He said, to me and to his lieutenant, “No chance. I’ll be here as long as I want to be. They’ll never get me out.”

  He said it in a totally matter-of-fact way, just as he might ask, “How’s that tuna sandwich?”

  His ego, his arrogance, was just completely imperturbable. He had been in intense situations all his life. He wasn’t acting—for him, it was the sum total of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months of working under incredible pressure, and mastering it.

  He had accumulated all this authority, the ability and the willingness to use it. He was totally acclimated to it. He had become unflappable, impervious to the possibility that anything outside his own will could change his life.

  In fact, the city council had announced his replacement just two weeks before the Rodney King riots broke out. Gates had been vague about when he would leave—and got more stubborn after the riots. His cool cockiness with me notwithstanding, six weeks after our lunch he formally announced his resignation, and he was gone as chief two weeks after that.3

  My visit with Daryl Gates was strange, memorable, unsettling. In other words, it was perfect.

  Some people might have been curious why Gates became a police officer, and how he climbed the ladder to become chief of an 8,000-officer force.4 Some people might have been curious how a man like Gates spent his workday—what did he pay attention to, in terms of what was going on in the city? Some people might have wondered what being immersed in nothing but the crimes of Los Angeles does to one’s view of such a beautiful city, and to the view of its people.

  My mission was different. I wanted a sense of the personality of someone who wears the chief’s uniform with absolute confidence, who commands a miniature paramilitary state.

  What does an encounter like that do for me?

  First, it gets me completely out of the world I live in. For a few hours, I lived in Daryl Gates’s universe—a world that could not be more different from my own. From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning to the moment he closed his eyes at night, every single day, it’s likely that Chief Gates dealt with things that I had probably never even considered.

  The big stuff is different—his goals, his priorities, his values.

  The minutiae are different—how he dresses, how he carries himself, how he talks to the people around him.

  Daryl Gates and I lived in the same city, we were both in positions of influence, we were both successful, but our worlds were so different, they hardly overlapped. We literally looked at the very same city from completely different perspectives, every day.

  That’s what Daryl Gates did for me: he completely disrupted my point of view.

  • • •

  WE ARE ALL TRAPPED in our own way of thinking, trapped in our own way of relating to people. We get so used to seeing the world our way that we come to think that the world is the way we see it.

  For someone who makes his living finding and telling stories on movie and TV screens, that parochialism can be dangerous. It’s also boring.

  One of the most important ways I use curiosity every day is to see the world through other people’s eyes, to see the world in ways I might otherwise miss. It’s totally refreshing to be reminded, over and over, how different the world looks to other people. If we’re going to tell stories that are compelling and also varied, we need to be able to capture those points of view.

  Consider for a moment just a few of the seventeen movies that Ron Howard and I have made together, that I’ve produced and Ron has directed.

  There’s Night Shift, with Michael Keaton running a call-girl ring out of the New York City morgue, and Parenthood, about Steve Martin’s effort to juggle work and being a good father.

  There’s Backdraft, about the courage firefighters require and the split-second judgment they need on the job, and A Beautiful Mind, the story of John Nash, who was both a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician and a schizophrenic.

  There’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with Jim Carrey bringing Dr. Seuss’s Grinch to life, and Frost/Nixon, the drama behind David Frost’s television interviews with ex-president Richard Nixon.

  Those six movies capture the perspective of a raffish morgue attendant, a funny but self-critical father, a team of fearless firefighters, a brilliant but mentally ill mathematician, a cartoon misanthrope, and a canny TV journalist interviewing a disgraced former president.

  That’s a wonderfully varied range of characters, a wild array of points of view, stories tha
t include comedy and quest and tragedy, settings that range from Princeton University during the Cold War to the inside of a burning skyscraper in the eighties, from the cold room at the New York City morgue to suburban America. They don’t seem to have anything in common—and yet they not only came from the same company, Imagine, but all of them were shepherded by Ron and me.

  That’s the kind of work I want to do, and have always wanted to do, in Hollywood. I don’t want to produce the same movie over and over again with slightly different characters—even unconsciously.5

  So how does this relate to my conversation with LAPD Chief Daryl Gates?

  Curiosity. I don’t know how other people in the story business keep themselves from going stale, but my secret is curiosity—and specifically the curiosity conversations.

  The variety in my work (and my life) comes from curiosity. It is the tool I use to search out different kinds of characters and stories than I would be able to make up on my own. Some people can dream up a person like Daryl Gates. I have to meet someone like that in person. To see how the world looks from his perspective, I have to sit in the same room with him. I have to ask him questions for myself and not only hear how he answers, but see how the expression on his face changes as he answers.

  The curiosity conversations have a critical rule, an almost completely counterintuitive rule: I never have a curiosity conversation in order to find a movie to make. I have the conversations because I’m interested in a topic or a person. The conversations have allowed me to build up a reservoir of experiences and points of view.

  Often, in fact, what happens is not that a conversation will inspire a movie or an idea—just the opposite. Someone will develop an idea for a movie or TV show—someone at Imagine will have an inspiration, a writer or a director will come to us with a story, I’ll have an idea—and a curiosity conversation I’ve had years earlier will bring all the possibilities of that idea to life for me.