Episode 20: Scott Derrickson on Cinema, Blockbusters, Horror, and Mystery

0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast, I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Today, we have a special treat. Scott Derrickson is an accomplished movie director, writer and producer, responsible for films such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and most recently, the Marvel movie Doctor Strange. Scott's also an extremely thoughtful guy with strong ideas about the craft of filmmaking, the history of cinema and the relationship between movies and other art forms. So we have a wide-ranging conversation, which basically falls into two parts. The first thing we did was, we sort of deconstructed the making of a big blockbuster superhero movie, using Doctor Strange as an example. So we lay out the whole thing from the initial pitch, the meeting where you talk to studio and see if you're on the same wavelength, through pre-production, shooting, reshoots, and finally post-production.

0:00:52 SC: You'll learn, for example, why the cast and crew, especially Benedict Cumberbatch, thought it was really important to shoot on location in Nepal, and why digital photography is okay for most shots in a big movie like this, but why you have to switch to film once you're outside in the sunshine. These are things that, as a theoretical physicist, I'm not generally up on, so I really learned a lot from this conversation. Then in the second part, we'll talk more broadly about the idea of cinema and film and what it means, the role of themes and stories in filmmaking. Many of Scott's films have been horror movies, and we talk about the unique role of that particular genre and evoking a certain kind of human reaction, how that relates to the existence of evil, and everyday human anxieties, whether or not you have supernatural boogeyman in your movie or not.

0:01:39 SC: We also come from different perspectives about the fundamental nature of reality. Scott is a Christian, I am a naturalist, and so we talk about how one's world view influences the story one tries to tell in a movie, and Scott says the answer is "A lot." He says he'd be a very, very different movie maker if he suddenly converted to atheism tomorrow, but it's unlikely to happen. We also agree, though, that the world is more interesting with people coming from different perspectives, so Scott says he doesn't want me to convert to his religious viewpoint. Only afterwards did I realized that maybe this means I'm gonna be condemned to eternal damnation. Happily, I'm not so sure about that and I don't even believe it myself, so I'm not really worried, but it's one of the things that you have to take into account when you talk about these big picture issues.

0:02:25 SC: Anyway, this was truly a great conversation, I'm sure you're gonna enjoy it. Remember that, if you're so inclined, you can support Mindscape on Patreon, patreon.com/seanmcarroll. We love our supporters, thanks so much. And whether you're a Patreon pledger or not, thanks very much for listening. So let's go.

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0:03:01 SC: Scott Derrickson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:03 Scott Derrickson: So good to be here, thanks.

0:03:04 SC: Now, I do want to talk about big picture stuff, themes in cinema and all these great things I know that you have lots of opinions on, but I thought, let's set the stage and get into it by being a little bit more down to earth. So you've directed Doctor Strange.

0:03:18 SD: Yep.

0:03:18 SC: Big, blockbuster Marvel movie. When I see movies like this these days, and we all see them, one of the things is, at the end of it, the credits are very, very long.

0:03:27 SD: Yes.

0:03:28 SC: It's a gigantic operation, to shepherd something like this from start to finish that. So why don't you, for the audience who are not necessarily cinephiles, just explain what it's like from the initial pitch for the idea to opening night.

0:03:46 SD: For a movie that size, from the original pitch to opening night is probably, usually about two years, for a movie of that size. And the script process goes on for a good six to nine months before what they call hard prep, hard preproduction begins. So there's always that six to nine month period where you're getting the scripts written, rewritten, putting it in shape where you're breaking it down and getting it ready to shoot. And then that process, for a movie this size, always continues through prep and through production.

0:04:27 SC: You never stop rewriting.

0:04:28 SD: You never stop rewriting. And by the way, that's... There are plenty of directors who work that way anyway. Stanley Kubrick, I'm reading the book about him and his relationship Arthur C. Clarke, and he was rewriting 2001 all the way through post. He was just rewriting and publishing whole time.

0:04:45 SC: My impression is his relationship with all of the authors he adapted was touchy.

0:04:48 SD: Well yes, especially given the fact that he said, "Only bad movies make... Only bad books make good movies." I think that may have been a reason why the relationship was always touchy, but it was certainly in... I highly recommend that book, by the way. The relationship that the two of them had is so fascinating and the book is really dense, really well-researched, and I know a lot about that movie and I didn't know anything in that book. But anyway, so back to your question. Then you've got three major phases of filmmaking, which is preproduction. I think the longest and most important phase, because that's when you're really designing everything that will become the physical reality of the movie.

0:05:31 SC: Well actually, I don't wanna pass too quickly over the pitch.

0:05:33 SD: Sure. Right, right.

0:05:34 SC: Originally, did... Obviously, Doctor Strange is a preexisting idea, so it's a different kind of thing. There's all sorts of different ways that movie can come about, but did you have an angle on the movie and then go to Marvel, or did they come to you and say, "Hey, do you wanna think about this?"

0:05:46 SD: That's a good question. What they did is, they had a pool of directors that, in their minds, were possibilities, and it was a large pool. Dozens of directors that they liked and at this point, Marvel was beginning its really big expansion, which has taken place in just the last few years, and they had approached me years ago about Thor, and I just told them that I wouldn't know how to make Thor into a movie.

0:06:15 SC: Not your superhero.

0:06:16 SD: Yeah, not my superhero, just to let you know. And I don't think there's any superhero that I would have felt personally drawn to, except for Doctor Strange. So when I heard they were making Doctor Strange, I felt immediately like, this is something I could definitely do. And the way the process worked was, they brought me in along with, again, dozens of other directors, and they had a short document, sign an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement. And you read this document, and I was very impressed with the document, because the things that were in there were essentially what they felt should and shouldn't be a Doctor Strange movie, and it was very basic, but it lined up perfectly with mine, which... They really liked the deep ideas and the philosophical overtones of the Doctor Strange comics. There were aspects of the Lovecraftian monsters that they weren't interested in, at least in an early film, and I was, I felt like they understood the character, this lonely, isolated character, who is different than other superheroes because of his relationship to other dimensions, not in a scientific sense, but in the Marvel comic universe sense. And that they were looking for a way to open up the MCU, the Marvel Comic Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to a multiverse, where you're actually dealing, literally, with other dimensions, unlike Asgard, which is out there in our own universe.

0:07:42 SC: Literally somewhere.

0:07:43 SD: Somewhere. You can fly there, if you've got a means to get there.

0:07:46 SC: I was actually part of the science advising for Thor, when it came out.

0:07:52 SD: Which was a huge aspect of that movie, and I think because they did that so well in that movie, I think that they recognized that, when it came to Doctor Strange, it was okay to let magic be magic.

0:08:07 SC: Exactly. And I think that part of it was Thor, despite being a god, in some sense, we're gonna portray him as pretty grounded. We think he's a god, 'cause he's super powerful, but it has to make sense. Almost intentionally leaving the magic thing for later in the series, and that's where you could do it.

0:08:22 SD: Right. Because as much as I love and respect science, I don't think that an approach of trying to scientifically validate the mysticism of Doctor Strange would be interesting to me, and it would feel like a disrespect to the comics, and so...

0:08:38 SC: I'm on board.

0:08:39 SD: The fact that that's not where they were coming from was great. So I immediately thought, "I think I'm the right guy to do this movie." I felt a real deep conviction about it, and I decided that I would put everything I could into getting that job, and I just decided that I was going to work harder to try to get that job than anything I had ever done before, in terms of efforts to get hired for things. This is obnoxious, but I've said it publicly before. I spent $42,000 of my own money on a presentation.

0:09:11 SC: Wow.

0:09:12 SD: Which was the eighth of eight meetings.

0:09:14 SC: I bet you made it back, didn't you? [laughter]

0:09:16 SD: Well, not only did I make it back, but one of the first things when they hired me is, they said, "We have to buy that presentation, because we need to own all that material." So that was immediately... That was my first... Even before I had a directing deal, I got all that money back. But it was... For me, it was coming from a very personal place, it wasn't so much that I... I was excited to make a Marvel movie, but I've never been somebody who's been enamored by big budget filmmaking, as opposed to small budget filmmaking. They all have their pros and cons as an artist to work on, they all have their pros and cons as films to watch. But in this case, I just felt like, this is a movie that I think I could do better than maybe anyone else, I'm the right fit for this. And that became my focus was to show them why I was the right fit.

0:10:09 SC: Yeah.

0:10:09 SD: Yeah.

0:10:10 SC: So you did that and they picked you.

0:10:12 SD: They did.

0:10:12 SC: And... So then you can start this wonderful process that you've started. And so preproduction, there was scripts being written and, I presume, there's a certain Hollywood thing right where there's some people who get credit for the script, but there's probably more voices that came in to actually...

0:10:26 SD: Yeah, in this case, there were the two credited writers, were Jon Spaihts, who wrote the first draft, who's a mutual friend of you, you know him. And he was one that we picked based on his original screenplay for Prometheus, which was called, I think, Alien Engineers, was brilliant. That screenplay was so good. And I would just... I'd been a fan of... His original script for Passengers was brilliant. And we hired him, so he did the first draft, and then myself and Cargill, my writing partner, who's here sitting next me, just listening in, just...

0:11:09 SC: Hi Cargill.

0:11:09 Robert Cargill: Hi everybody.

0:11:10 SD: That's Cargill.

0:11:11 SC: Follow him on Twitter, he has a great Twitter feed.

0:11:13 SD: He's... Yeah, follow Cargill on Twitter, that's... I'm here to pump Cargill's Twitter feed.

[laughter]

0:11:21 SD: But yeah, we came in and rewrote for quite a long time, we must have done 20 drafts, 25 drafts, something like that. And then there were some other writers who came in and took passes on it, to add humor, to try fixing some structural problems that we were having. Dan Harmon did a quick pass on it, which... There wasn't much that he wrote that ended up in the script, but his analysis of where we were having problems in the movie was so spot on, so he was actually a critical component in that movie eventually working.

0:11:58 SC: I'm finishing up writing a book, a popular book on quantum mechanics and I always send out my books to be read, my drafts, by other people. And sometimes they go like, "No, chapter three needs to be chapter eight." I'm like "Of course. Why didn't I think of that?"

0:12:08 SD: Yeah, exactly. And that was... So that whole process working with a budget this size is very common, it's not so common. Sometimes if you're working with a true auteur or director, they'll do everything on their own, and it works out and sometimes it doesn't but I don't mind the process of working hand in hand of rewriting other people's scripts or having my scripts rewritten as long as the people are talented and I get along with them.

0:12:38 SC: And meanwhile there's a million things going on, casting and the set design.

0:12:41 SD: Yes. It all happens all at the same time.

0:12:43 SC: Right. And are you kind of the boss, or partly the boss of all that?

0:12:47 SD: Yeah, it's a... You're the captain of the ship. And so everything goes through you, and everybody has to come to you for information about what you're looking for, and you give that information and there's a tremendous amount of delegating clearly, but you ultimately are responsible as being the only person who's holding it all together in your head.

0:13:10 SC: Yeah.

0:13:10 SD: And a big part of that process becomes helping... For me it's to... On Doctor Strange in particular, it was really two things. I mean, one of them was making it really clear to all the major department heads, what the target of the movie was. What it was that we were going to be making. And for me, it was an emphasis upon, "This is a mind bending, mind trip, action movie about a sole personality about one guy overcoming himself, getting past his own selfishness.

0:13:43 SC: I mean at some point... At some point the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is mature right?

0:13:48 SD: Right.

0:13:48 SC: You have to look for ways to distinguish.

0:13:50 SD: Yes, and you have to say, "This is not... This is unlike these other films in this way, but I do like this sensibility." For Marvel... For example, when it came to performances, some Marvel films are more over the top and cartoony or comic bookey if I can use that phrase. And for Doctor Strange, because we were gonna be venturing out into such fantastical terrain, I actually wanted the performances to be very realistic. So that was part of the casting process, which is why we got such serious actors to play pretty dramatic roles. Rachel McAdams and Tilda Swinton and Chiwetel Ejiofor and you know these Oscar winning people, and of course, Benedict. And probably you know that sensibility was something that everyone needs to understand. So as a director, you have to make a certain basic vision of what the movie is going to be clear to everybody so that they understand the sensibility behind it. And I think a... That's so helpful and then encourage them... My whole process for sure is encourage them to bring me better ideas than mine. And then they always do, when they're good.

0:15:07 SC: And are you doing a lot of recruiting of actors. Sometimes they want the role really badly. Other times they're playing hard to get.

0:15:13 SD: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. In the case of the major roles for Doctor Strange, we went after every one of those actors for specific reasons. Benedict was our first choice. We wanted him. We... And we talked about other possibilities for a very short time, but we... Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel, you really make the movie with him. He's not just a studio head. He is very hands on. He's really in there with you without a lot of middle men. And he and I quickly agreed that he was the right guy and I flew to London immediately and met with Benedict and the timing didn't work out because he was doing Hamlet, in London. And so then I had to start looking for other actors and nothing was... I mean, I met with amazing actors. But in the end, it was just like, it's gotta be Benedict. And Kevin to his credit, went for the second time, back to Disney. And said, "We really want Benedict, so we need to move the release date." So we moved the release date from the summer.

0:16:18 SC: That's a huge deal.

0:16:19 SD: It's a huge deal because the fall is not as lucrative. It's just not. And so, we probably could have made even more money in terms of opening day and that sorta thing, but we wouldn't have made the movie that we made because it's so centered around Benedict.

0:16:33 SC: And at the same time you're deciding what the sets are going to look like. I remember, I don't know if you saw this little video you can find on YouTube. The Russo brothers did a video about Infinity War. They just analyzed a little 30 second scene, right? And it was where Thor, appears with the Guardians of the Galaxy. And it's a great scene, but it just impresses on someone like me who is not in the business, how much effort goes into those 30 seconds. With the lighting coming from particular ways and the postures of every actor and which things you're gonna do and this is all going in your mind in this pre-production phase, right?

0:17:07 SD: Yeah. Yeah, and you... And the break down of all the different elements that have to go into how to shoot those particular sets. And this is why the pre-production phase is the most critical phase, because you've gotta have enough time, first of all, to dream it up and then to thrash it and criticize it in your mind and think about what could be better. I think one of the main reasons why so many big blockbuster movies are not great is because you have enough money to afford your first idea.

0:17:41 SC: That's a good point.

0:17:41 SD: And your first idea is rarely your best idea. And so it takes a real conscious discipline to come up with these ideas, but then to be very harsh and critical of them, and to their credit, I think it's one of the things that Marvel does better than anybody. They they are not ever impressed with their own work and so everything is always being criticized by everybody all the time, which, as the director can become a little painful at times. [laughter] But it...

0:18:12 SC: Sounds like being a scientist actually.

0:18:15 SD: No, it's the same idea, which is if you want to get to the best version of something or to the truth of something or to an ideal of some kind, you're not going to get there without admitting to all your shortcomings and all your failures and all the things that actually don't work and don't quite line up. And it's true of writing as well. The phrase that we would always use in working on Doctor Strange, between myself and Cargill and particularly John Spades, was we're doing a lot of hand waving in the scene and the hand waving of... We're all pretending like this works in a way. It actually doesn't work.

0:18:53 SC: That's literally what physicists say to each other. You're hand waving this, this particular question, right?

0:18:56 SD: Yeah. Yes, and it's the same thing. And because so much of film making, is... I love the fact that the Academy is the Academy of Arts and Sciences, because there is so much of what you're in service of is art, but so much of the actual making of a movie is science, so much of it is just physical, it's practical, it's... And even down to things, in the case of Doctor Strange, and this gets still to your initial question about communicating with department heads. One of the things that I was adamant about from the beginning that was probably the hardest concept to get across to people, was that we were gonna have these incredible fantastical sequences of the mind trip through multi-dimension, multiple dimensions, and New York being turned into this Escher-esque puzzle, and people fighting in their astro forms, all that. But my mantra was, "I want the physical materials of what is on screen, the physical material that the audience is looking at to feel tactile and real, and something they can relate to," as opposed to say, "The emperor's amorphous lightning bolt finger lights," like we don't have a reference for anything that looks like that in our experience. Lightning is sharper edged than that.

0:20:17 SC: Yeah.

0:20:19 SD: Even Tesla light is more defined than... So I was always coming back to that. No amorphous light... No, no, I don't wanna represent magic as being this, I want it to be... So for example, when they create the mantras, that's very crispy sparkly material that looks like the sparkles you grew up playing with and looks like fire. And look, you feel like you have a sense of what it would feel like to touch that material?

0:20:47 SC: Right. So you wanted the distance between this crazy magic stuff and our human experience to be as short as possible.

0:20:51 SD: Exactly, because I think that as soon as it's not... If you try to merge, if you try to communicate magic... I felt, and I still feel that if you try to communicate magic with physical representations that have no human context in terms of their tactile, your visual tactile relationship to them in your own mind, then you're using something unrelatable to try to communicate something unrelatable. And I really feel that the best way to get the audience to feel a sense of awe is if you're showing them something unrelatable but everything that's actually in the frame has a physical relatability to their experience. Like that was a bit... And that's everything... I mean, this took me several minutes just to try to get the concept across to you and you can see how that's a difficult thing than to get across to a farm of 50 visual effects operators. We know we'll get there...

0:21:44 SC: Well, is it the same thing where you're saying about the first idea is not the best one in this CGI ready age, it's maybe too easy to just make some amorphous lightning bolts do all the work.

0:21:54 SD: Exactly right, exactly right. And it was a constant struggle to reject things and I think that at times it was very frustrating for the visual effects people because they aren't, weren't used to that kind of scrutiny and I was pointing them, I was saying, we're doing these things that are so fantastical and no one's done it before, and there's no precedent for the visual thing that we're doing, but it can't, it can't look unreal.

0:22:26 SC: Right. [laughter]

0:22:26 SD: It's a...

0:22:26 SC: That's a tough challenge. So they would script this right there.

0:22:29 SD: Exactly... Yeah, this... So it was, but they... But they did really get behind it. I think that once they... Once I managed to communicate that at a deep enough level, something sort of kicked in, and it was very... It was Industrial Light and Magic and a company called LUMA and a couple of others, the head people who were working on the project for those companies became very excited at the prospect and suddenly realized that they were going to get to create some things that were gonna be boundary pushing for them...

0:23:02 SC: Right, and that's a message across...

0:23:04 SD: And that's what you want, you want them to get excited that they get to be co-creators. That they get to bring... I wanted them to bring me things that superseded my ideas but I kept kicking them back because it was like... It's not that kind of magic, it's not, I don't... It has to feel physically tactile to the audience. They've gotta have some way of relating to every piece of visual material they're looking at.

0:23:29 SC: Okay, and some point production starts, there you are, where did you start? What was the first thing you did?

0:23:35 SD: The first thing we did is Nepal. We shot in Kathmandu in Nepal and we had gone there three times, I think we did an early scout there before the big earthquake and then the earthquake occurred and we did a second scout and there was a real question about safety, about working there. Because if another quake happened, and it was... There were huge piles of rubble everywhere, and some of the sets that we had picked were destroyed.

0:24:04 SC: Wow. Who knew.

0:24:05 SD: So it was a... But it was a pretty major decision. And Benedict to his credit sort of led the charge in saying that we have to shoot here now, like we have to. Like they need it, they need... They need to be... Nepal to be represented, because tourism... You know, it's a third world country, and tourism is one of the primary sources of income, and tourism just vanished after that earthquake. And he really felt like this is a special place. He had a history there, he had been there when he was younger, and he said, "We have to shoot here now because it's a moral good, and we'll find a way to make it all safe." And everybody got behind that, it was great, yeah.

0:24:45 SC: Yeah. And how long does the actual shooting take overall?

0:24:49 SD: With the Marvel movie, shooting days are usually around 80 to 85 days, which is not much, I mean...

0:25:00 SC: I was gonna tell you... I was going to ask, does it feel rushed?

0:25:01 SD: Yes.

0:25:01 SC: Yeah.

0:25:02 SD: And... But they have their... They have very good reasons for doing it, I think. Because I think that... For example, my first assistant director, who had just come off Spectre, the James Bond movie, that movie was 123 shooting days. And I made Doctor Strange in like 85. And, but what it does is when you know that your production time is so compressed, it just makes everybody raise their game. Because when you get the reality of the schedule in front of you, and you realize on these... On this week, we have to accomplish all of this, everyone works harder. And I think that there is a lot of truth to... It was Orson Welles who said, "The absence of boundaries is the enemy of art". And I really believe that's true, which you need, I think, a measure of pressure and limitation in order to facilitate the highest measure of creativity.

0:26:01 SC: I think Robert Frost had the famous quote about, you know would he ever write free verse, and he says, "It's like playing tennis without a net", right?

[laughter]

0:26:08 SC: It's not fun anymore.

0:26:10 SD: Right, right exactly. So I... And I think that they... There's a real method to Marvel's approach to that. But they also work with the understanding that there's almost certainly going to be a sizeable amount of re-shooting.

0:26:25 SC: I was gonna ask, so I presume they're doing some special effects work while you're shooting. There must be an enormous amount of effort just to put together what you've shot on... Are you shooting digitally? Or...

0:26:37 SD: Yeah. Well, we actually in Kathmandu, we shot all of that on film. I am a big believer in digital photography, I've certainly... It's not just the future, it's here, it's like what everybody works on with the exception of a few auteurs like Tarantino and Chris Nolan who can afford to shoot all of their films on actual film. But I've yet to see still daylight exteriors look great on digital, I just think daylight exteriors have a quality, even the best work that I've seen still has a quality that pales so to film. And so we do, we did... I did, was able to convince everybody that we need to shoot Kathmandu in...

0:27:14 SC: It's an interesting science question, because there's no reason in principle why it couldn't look as good. It's just two different ways of recording photons landing on your detector somehow. But...

0:27:23 SD: Yeah, and it... But I think...

0:27:24 SC: Something about film, I agree. There's something that makes it feel more real.

0:27:28 SD: It makes it feel more real, and I think that it has to do with our experience of the specificities of sunlight. And again, it's like cloud cover, if it's a cloud covered day, like we did digital exteriors on Sinister, and thank God there was cloud cover when we shot those, because they look great.

0:27:48 SC: Right.

0:27:48 SD: It all looks great. That would... That, that... The differential between film and digital, when it comes to cloud cover days is in my opinion, negligible, it's not that important. But daylight exteriors, when you're dealing with sunlight on people's faces or shooting the actual sky itself, the difference is enormous. I mean, so enormous that for me, it always pulls me out of a movie, when I'm looking at digital daylight exteriors. They just don't feel real.

0:28:14 SC: And when you start with the re-shoots, are the re-shoots something... It was planned in presumably to the schedule, and is it mostly because you say the scene isn't working, or we could do it better? What makes you go do a re-shoot?

0:28:25 SD: Well, what you do is you put the movie together, and most of the visual effects are not being done yet, because you want to have the movie in relatively good shape before you start building all those visual elements. So, the post-production process is when you build most of the effects. So there's a lot of green screen in that first cut. And what you really need to do is get it together, and get it in front of people quickly. And whether at first it's five people, 10 people. And then get a small little in-house crew of 50 strangers to watch it. And you will learn very soon and painfully...

0:29:09 SC: Like it or not.

0:29:10 SD: What doesn't work. And what does work and what doesn't work. And you get a good idea of, "Okay, here's what our problems are". And that begins the process of start... You immediately start to plan, "Okay, what are we gonna need to do... To be different, to solve some of these problems?" Now, occasionally, even a big movie like a Marvel movie, doesn't need much of that, I believe they only did a few days of re-shoots for The Avengers, for the first Avengers. That movie just came in, everything worked. That's rare, even for a small independent film. I mean, I... We did no re-shoots on Sinister, that we didn't need them. That's rare. It was a $3 million movie, but on Doctor Strange, we definitely did. But we also knew that we would, because we knew that we were struggling with certain things still in the screenplay while we were making it. And the surprising thing is, what does work that you didn't think would work and what doesn't work that you assumed would work. You know, it's always...

0:30:14 SC: Interesting, yeah.

0:30:14 SD: It's always illuminating. I think film making is a bit like baking, where if you're a chef, and especially if you're a world class chef, you are an expert at understanding, "If I put these ingredients together and I put... ", but you gotta do that.

0:30:30 SD: You gotta do it.

0:30:30 SD: You gotta do it the first time. But once. And film making is like creating a recipe for the first time and you know so many things about how it's gonna work, but then it goes into the oven and what comes out is what's gonna come out.

0:30:46 SD: You know what I mean? And when it comes out, it's gonna come out and surprise you in some way. It might be way better than you thought, it probably will not be as good as you thought.

0:30:53 SC: I've had some dishes in fancy restaurants that clearly should have been tasted before they came out, yeah.

0:30:58 SD: Yeah. So there's a component of, I think you put all the ingredients in, you make all the hard choices, you do try to make... In your mind as a director, you've made a perfect film. You've visualized everything, you see it all. But then when the actual thing is there, you have to come to realize the things that don't work.

0:31:21 SC: And then how much time is spent between the end of the reshoots, and the opening night?

0:31:29 SD: We had a very short post production schedule because...

0:31:31 SC: There's the score. And there's visual effects.

0:31:33 SD: Yeah. Because of Benedict's schedule and having moved it to the fall, we had a long prep, which again, I think was the most important thing, but we had a short post, and the result was a kind of crazed panic because we had to get all those reshoots done and get the visual effects done on time. My visual effects team was so smart in that they hired multiple houses, big houses, to all start work at the same time, which you usually don't really do. You usually rely heavily on a single house, a single visual effects house. So that process for us, I think it was only like four months. Typically, it's gonna be more like six or seven months.

0:32:12 SC: And there's a deadline that is not fungible, it's staring at you in the face.

0:32:17 SD: Yeah, oh yeah. Movies this size work from their release dates, backwards. You start the process, reverse engineering from the day that the movie's gonna come out.

0:32:26 SC: Are you fiddling with it right up to the last second?

0:32:28 SD: The film?

0:32:29 SC: Yeah.

0:32:30 SD: Let me put it this way. My final work on Doctor Strange, was at around 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning when I finished color timing, which is the last thing you do. You finish the actual color timing of the master print so that when you watch it, when you watch the finished color timing version that's the finished movie. The sound is all mixed. You've done all the work there is to do. You're finished. That's it. I finished that at 12:30 at night and was on a plane at six that morning. So, five and a half hours later, I was on a plane to Hong Kong to start the press junket.

0:33:10 SD: So yes, I was literally working.

0:33:12 SC: Was it all on thumbdrive? I mean, where was this movie?

0:33:17 SD: Yeah, well the... This was all on the Disney lots and it's all, it was all in the studios, and we really did... That's unusual, the degree to which we just needed every last second. And that's when I was working seven days a week and 18 hour days for months.

0:33:34 SC: No time for podcasting.

0:33:35 SD: No time for podcasting. Yeah.

0:33:38 SD: And it's exhausting, but very exhilarating because that post process is the most fun.

0:33:44 SC: Is it?

0:33:44 SD: Oh yes, just editing. All post production is so much fun.

0:33:48 SC: Do all Directors believe that or do different directors think differently.

0:33:50 SD: I think that most directors probably prefer editing to other... I think that's probably... I think the majority of us feel that way because you get to see all the work come together. It's another phase of writing, you're still getting to write the movie, and it's as creative as writing, definitely more creative in my opinion, than production, but production is the worst. Production is just grueling. It's just so...

0:34:13 SC: Production in the sense of making sure the craft services gets paid and stuff or what does that...

0:34:17 SD: No, production meaning just working those long hours and the physical... What people really don't understand about making a movie this size is the physical toll that it takes, the physical demand on you is pretty extraordinary.

0:34:32 SC: Yeah.

0:34:33 SD: I mean you really do enter... They have people compare it to War which is the most ridiculous now.

0:34:38 SC: That's probably too far.

0:34:39 SD: Yeah, yeah, we eat, we crap, we eat catered food and sleep in warm beds every night, and we're getting paid huge amounts of money, but otherwise...

0:34:48 SC: Relatively few casualties.

0:34:49 SD: And nobody dies, but it's just like War. But it is like, it is kinda like joining the army. It is that kind of...

0:34:55 SC: Boot camp, yeah.

0:34:57 SD: Boot camp, just brutal. This is not for the faint of heart. And you really do have to watch what you eat and drink, and manage your sleep habits, because if you don't, the moving train that you're running in front of will mow you over.

0:35:15 SC: Well, that's why I can imagine personally writing a movie script someday. I can never even imagine directing a movie. It just sounds like so much stuff is going on. It must take a very special kinda personality to say, "That's what I wanna do, I wanna be in a thing where there's so many different failure modes that could go wrong around me."

0:35:35 SD: Yes.

0:35:35 SC: And I wanna live with that. Is this what you wanted to do from the start?

0:35:39 SD: Yeah, it is. For me it was, and I think still is, a two fold thing. Part of it is just, I have a talent for it, I have a knack for it. And I think I felt that that was going to be the case when I was even in high school, just putting together a little Super Eight films and stuff like that. I just felt like I had a knack for understanding film language and I'd watched... I grew up in a family that watched so many movies, so I understood movies in a way that I think people my age typically don't, or at least didn't then, I think now it's much more common, you know, people are watching so many films growing up.

0:36:16 SC: Right.

0:36:17 SD: But I think that what I love about directing, but the actual experience of directing is to be... Do everything in the service of a piece of artistic entertainment, that's gonna be seen by millions of people and to feel the responsibility of "I get to have a couple of hours of their hard-earned life, their rest time, their hard-earned money is gonna be spent on a Friday night to go with their girlfriend or wife or family, whatever, and watch this movie". I want them to have the best time of their week.

0:36:53 SC: Right.

0:36:53 SD: And that's always there. And I want them to have something human, I want them to have a human experience and have fun and be amazed by it, and I want them to remember it and possibly watch it again, and love it as a part of their life, you know? And so you start with that and that's the goal, that's what you're in service of, it's... That's a very... There's some real altruistic, I think, truth to that, but then in the action of actually doing it, the satisfaction for me is that it demands usage of every single thing I'm good at, like my ability to communicate, my leadership skills, my salesmanship, you know?

0:37:33 SD: Along with my love for film language, my understanding of cinema history, my ability to write all is... To be able to utilize and feel like you're in a profession where you are utilizing everything that you are really good at. It's all being utilized at the highest level. That's the ultimate job for anyone. Yeah.

0:37:53 SC: Fulfilling in that sense.

0:37:54 SD: It's fulfilling in that sense. Flannery O'Connor was asked, "Why do you write these quirky little stories about freaks? The short stories about freaks?" And her answer was, "Because I'm good at it." [laughter] And I just thought that should be everybody's answer.

0:38:06 SC: That's the job you want, yeah.

0:38:06 SD: That should be everbody's answer to why they do what they do. Because if you're good at it, and you love it, that's your calling, that's what you should do.

0:38:13 SC: And you have to do it though, within this framework we call Hollywood, right? Tell us a little bit about your fitting in with the whole Hollywood superstructure. Movies are obviously a big part of it, but business is a big part of it, egos are a big part of it and so forth.

0:38:25 SD: Yeah. Well, I think that I've been fortunate because I've managed to work for a lot of difficult people, and even people who are notoriously difficult within Hollywood. I worked for the Weinsteins for years, and I think that I survived a lot of the people I worked for in the past and survived in a way a lot of artist didn't and a lot of good artists didn't. So I think that my survival skills are strong, there was that, but I think that it was also my ability to sell. My dad was a car dealer.

0:39:03 SC: Oh, I didn't know that.

0:39:04 SD: Yeah, my dad owned a couple of car dealerships when I was in high school. He got sick and lost all of his money when I was in college, but I worked as a car salesman for him and I've always credited my work as a car salesman to... I think my talent as a filmmaker, is what it is, but I think that my ability to navigate the waters of Hollywood and to actually put together a career and to keep working has so much to do with my ability to sell because you're always selling an idea, you're selling a script, a pitch, you're selling yourself to your crew members, you're selling yourself to the studios to get jobs, you're selling yourself in marketing the movie. That's such a big part of the job.

0:39:48 SC: Getting actors to listen to you and you tell them to do something.

0:39:50 SD: For sure and by the way, so much of that is... So much of what make makes me an effective director was understanding that in sales, you come to understand you can't talk to every customer the same way. Your job is to figure out who are they, how do they need to be communicated with? Because that's your job. And so, actors or the same way, they're all powerfully emotional people, but they all need to be spoken to in different ways depending on who they are and so you have to learn to do that and I think that... I think so much of Hollywood success demands either incredible luck, just unparalleled raw genius or an ability to sell.

0:40:36 SC: Right. Two of those three would be helpful.

0:40:39 SD: Yeah. If you have two of those three, then you're in really good shape, then you're Stanley Kubrick.

0:40:43 SC: Yeah, that's right. So you have done the big block buster super hero thing... Actually, before I leave that topic, how hard is it to keep the humanity, the character's narrative strength in a movie that is just that big with effects and so forth?

0:41:01 SD: I'm really glad that you asked that question because I think that it is the greatest challenge of directing a film that big. And I think that it's the number one reason why you see big Hollywood blockbuster movies that don't work, because a lot of times they've worked in a script phase in a way that they don't work by the time they reach the screen. And so often what I can feel from those movies is that the director was not able, for whatever reason, maybe it was his fault, maybe not, or her fault, but that for some reason that human emotional story was not remaining central during the production because the production was so demanding and that... In making Doctor Strange, I was determined that would not be the way that movie would fail.

0:41:51 SD: There were plenty of ways for it to fail. But I was like, "You won't feel it felt that way." So and what I literally had to do was I created a document for every shooting day that just had... For every shooting day that was on the movie that had the central emotional narrative story points for this character, because I knew that when I was shooting it, that all of my time would be spent talking to people about practical issues, and where the camera goes, and how we can get this done on time and all of that. And it's so easy to lose that, because you don't have time to be working through that much on a movie of this size. And so every day I would go in, and then I would remind myself what is the... I would start by reading at the top of my script what I just pitched to you.

0:42:42 SC: Yeah.

0:42:43 SD: It's a psychotropic, whatever it was, psychotropic mind trip action movie about one man overcoming himself. Just to remind myself, that's what I'm making.

0:42:52 SC: Yeah.

0:42:52 SD: And then to really focus on that with the characters and really understand, here's the emotional quality of what this guy and the people around him are going through. And I never lost sight of that while making Doctor Strange. And the reason why that's so important is people pay to go see these movies, because they see the trailer, and they see the spectacle, and they love Marvel, whatever. But when they get in there, the reason it works is because of an emotional connection to those actors.

0:43:20 SC: Yeah.

0:43:21 SD: It's always the sealing for how good a movie can be. A movie cannot be better than your lead character's story and performance, can't, it's impossible, it doesn't matter how great everything else is. If your lead actor's character and performance are not emotionally satisfying, the movie's not good. If that is satisfying, it's amazing how many things can be... Cannot work, and the movie will still work for you and there's still...

0:43:45 SC: And I saw you push back the release date to get Benedict Cumberbatch in your movie, yeah.

0:43:48 SD: Yeah, precisely, you know because he just had a quality that I felt for this particular character that he would be able to cover the range of emotions, and the cockiness and the arrogance, and still maintain likeability 'cause he is such a prick in the beginning of the movie, as he was in the comics and...

0:44:11 SC: He being Stephen Strange, not Benedict Cumberbatch.

0:44:13 SD: Yeah, no, no, he being Stephen Strange. Benedict is lovely, I love him, he's really genuinely a great guy. But yeah, so you gotta get the right actors in those roles, and then you gotta stay focused on that and not...

0:44:23 SC: Do you think of yourself as mostly a storyteller? Is that your task? Or is it something broader than that?

0:44:33 SD: I think that... I think it's broader than that, because I think cinema is broader than that. I do think that a story itself is important, because the story says something that only a story can. Okay? It can't... What makes a good story a good story is that it can't be reduced to something else. It can only... What it is communicating can only be communicated through that story. So you have to be a good storyteller. But I think that's, for me, and this is how I feel about movies I watch as well as the movies I make, cinema is something broader than just that, it's a major component, perhaps it's even the spinal column of the animal, of the movie. But the flesh and blood of cinema is something to me that is more artful and ineffable. That there's a quality to... A dreamlike quality to the cinema experience of submitting yourself to the immersion in this alternate reality, that supersedes the individual... That supersedes the art forms of just music and photography, and blocking theater, and the storytelling of literature. Because it is a combination of all those things, and the end result is still greater than the sum of its parts.

0:46:00 SC: Are you a fan of live theater also?

0:46:02 SD: Not really. No, and I think the reason...

0:46:04 SC: I sense that by what you were saying, yeah.

0:46:04 SD: Yeah, no I really... I'm really very hard on theater, because I find the experience so limiting compared to cinema, I would much rather watch a... I'd rather watch a mediocre movie than a good play, but a great play can certainly be an experience that's unlike anything else. When I saw Hamilton, for example, it's like, "Well this is one of the great works of art of the last 100 years." And I experienced it and understood why. But I think that cinema is a kind of experience that is as close to dreamlike magic that we get when it comes to art and entertainment.

0:46:52 SC: I think that they're different. I was just in London a couple of weeks ago, and we got to see Ian Michelin as King Lear at the Duke of York's Theatre, right? And so it was an interesting experience, not only 'cause he's fantastic, but because you are familiar with him from movies.

0:47:06 SD: Right.

0:47:06 SC: And now he's 20 feet away from you, being King Lear. And there's things that obviously a live theater performance cannot do that cinema can, but I think vice versa also, right? And I think that maybe comparing them is wrong. I just thought of it because you were talking about the history a little bit. And I think of cinemas coming out of live theatre back in the day.

0:47:27 SD: For sure.

0:47:27 SC: But it's, it's had a 100 some years to develop, and it's able to do things now that live theater can't even imagine.

0:47:34 SD: Yeah, and I think that the theater that I do enjoy tends to be more minimalistic. I will always enjoy a good Shakespeare play. Because it's some of the greatest writing in human history and if it's well made and well acted, that's going to be an extraordinary experience no matter what. So what I don't like is a spectacle Theatre.

0:48:00 SC: Yeah.

0:48:01 SD: And part of it's was one of the reasons why I liked Hamilton, because I loved... I love just entering in and seeing, Oh, this is just an empty stage. And there was a pretty simple back drop. And the experience was the music, the movement, these things that are inherently theatrical when it came to... I'm gonna step on toes, but it's like, see the big Phantom, a chandelier hovering over the audience. I just think it's ridiculous.

0:48:26 SC: Cheesy.

0:48:27 SD: And yeah. I'm like why... I can pay $8 in a movie... At a movie Matinee, and see something 1000 times greater than this right now.

0:48:37 SC: And do you think that gives that immersive quality cinema gives it this particular art form a way to get and connect with people's emotions, and you have sort of a visceral response that other methods don't.

0:48:48 SD: I do, I do. I think that it is primarily emotional, I think that... And I think that it is holistically emotional, I think that that's maybe... It's hard for me to describe it, because I usually don't have to. But there is a soulful holistic emotional quality to the cinema experience, that I do believe transcends the nature of the experience of any other individual kind of art. And it speaks to our subconscious in a way that other art forms don't. And especially directors who are aware of that, and can utilize that well. I just think that it's the greatest art form, and it's only because it's the amalgam of all the other great art forms. It's the amalgam of photography, and literature, and theater, and music. And when all those things come together into something that is pure, and creates a pure experience, the emotional power of it can be overwhelming. And for me, even a bad movie has a quality of that, that I still prefer to... And the closest thing to, I think it's probably music in the way that it can move you and transcend your experience. And I'm an avid reader. So there's no disrespect for literature or formal art.

0:50:11 SC: But in this approach, it makes perfect sense when you say that, that one of your favorite genres would be the horror movie, right? It has a kind of connection. You don't see that many horror plays, right? [laughter]

0:50:22 SD: It's hard to get scared in a play, because you need the intimacy of being lost within your own imagination, or within your own fears, and certainly horror literature works great.

0:50:38 SC: Right.

0:50:38 SD: You know, good horror... A good scary Stephen King book, scares you, you know. But not in the same way that a horror movie does. You don't usually read even a great chapter in The Shining and physically feel your pulse race as you do in a good horror film, where you get actually really scared. And that's what... And I think that cinema can do that. This is something... This is something I'm just gonna add in here while we're on this subject, because we're talking about the nature of movies themselves, and like what are movies. And I think one of the real clues to what makes movies special is the categorization of movies. Because you've got action movies, horror movies, dramas, comedies, thrillers and then you've got things like documentaries, but...

0:51:31 SC: Rom-com.

0:51:31 SD: Science fiction even. What's that?

0:51:33 SC: Rom-coms.

0:51:34 SD: Yeah, yeah, but those are... Yeah, that's still in the comedy section.

0:51:38 SC: Okay.

0:51:39 SD: It's a brand out under the comedy banner. This major categories, they're the same now on Netflix as they've always were in blockbuster. And I had this revelation one day when I was, I think a student... A film student. And I was going into a blockbuster video somewhere, and I was looking at them, and then I had... It just... The thought hit me. Who created these categories? Who created these categories? This is... These have been the categories that I've known movies to be under my whole life. And the more I thought about it, I thought, well the audience created these categories, the audience by wanting to see these different kinds of movies that separated into these like seven or eight major categories. And when I realized this is what they really are, is they're the major categories of human emotion. Fear for horror, comedy for laughter, joy, drama for sorrow for deeper feelings. The visceral excitement is action. Anxiety is thriller. And I think science fiction has always... Has... Is always built upon a sense of wonder, a wonderment combined usually with some other genre. And I think that, that this is these basic... Speaking to these basic human emotions is the nature of cinema, it's just what I does... It's just what movies do.

0:52:58 SC: So there's an obvious question, I'd like to get your take on. Why do people go to horror movies? Why do they wanna be scared? Why would you actually pay money for someone to make you feel unpleasant in some sense?

0:53:09 SD: A lot of people don't, and I think that the people who do, they like it for the same reason they like roller coasters, it's the powerful feeling of fear, which I think is arguably the most powerful human emotion. And to feel... To experience the visceral power of that emotion in environment where you know you're safe. Like in a roller coaster, you know you're not going to fly out of the car, but you feel like you're gonna fly out of the car, and so you're experiencing the adrenaline rush of that. And then for people who are serious horror fans, and people like me who consider it one of the undervalued great forms of movie art, it's that it gets to some of the most important human questions about good and evil, about metaphysics, the questions of the after life and the meaning of existence and how unspoken and unspeakable fears can be tapped into by great horror.

0:54:23 SD: These are all... These are things that I love. I speak... I'm waxing poetic about it, because... Because I do, I love it, I love it, and I revere it, and I think it's important, but I also completely understand and have no... I've nothing negative to say to... And some people who just don't like that. And so if somebody doesn't like that experience, they don't like it. And by the way, perhaps having spent my entire adult life making horror films there is no such thing as a horror type. It's like you... I've met some of the bravest cops in New York City, who are terrified to watch a horror movie and would never do it. Guys who dragged people out of the towers on 9/11.

0:55:04 SC: Yeah.

0:55:05 SD: And have risked their lives over and over again and they're just like, "Just don't show me any of that stuff." And then I'll meet a little old lady in a flower shop who's seen every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. [laughter] They just love them.

0:55:20 SC: Something human, well it's hard to predict what it is that people like.

0:55:23 SD: Yeah it's very hard to predict. Yeah...

0:55:24 SC: But I do wanna get into these metaphysical presuppositions. I think for you questions of evil and the purpose and meaning in life come into why you do horror but maybe also why you do other movies also.

0:55:39 SD: It's why I've...

0:55:40 SC: And we disagree about the metaphysical presuppositions. That'll need disagreement. That's okay.

0:55:43 SC: We do. We have... It's one of the things that I've... It's one of the things I've loved about our relationship is that we've spoken about this many times, we have very differing views of the nature of existence itself, but we've always admired and appreciated the other person's point of view, and respect the fact that both of those views are very personal and powerful to us as individuals. They inform everything else that we do in our work and the way we think about everything from practical life politics, right down to the meaning of our own life. And for me, I do think that everything that I've done, perhaps the through line in all of the work that I've done, including all of the script work on things that have not been produced, is a combination of this sort of love for genre for horror, thriller, action type sci-fi movies, and some kind of cross over into metaphysical questions. Questions about the nature of human existence and the possibilities of what life could be and certainly, the moral questions that arise is... That's one of the interesting things to me about horror is it's almost... It's very difficult to make an amoral horror film or a non-moral horror film.

0:57:10 SC: There's going to be a moral one way or the other.

0:57:12 SD: The movie even if it seems to have no moral center that becomes a moral point.

0:57:18 SC: Well, good and evil are out there, right? Like it or not.

0:57:19 SD: Good and evil are out there and so once you're dealing in horror, you're landing in terrain that is inherently so philosophical, it's inescapable, and I think it's inescapable in a way that it's not in other genres. And so I think that was... It was a big part of the poll too. That and the fact that there's a lot of room to improve the genre and has been in my life and I've really watched it happen, and I'm watching it happen. There's a... It was...

0:57:44 SC: There's more sophistication now.

0:57:45 SD: I think that horror in the 80s, in the 70s and 80s, was just slasher movies... That's all anybody ever thought about, but with the exception of master works by great non horror directors like Kubrick making The Shinning, or Friedkin making The Exorcist or something like that. But I think that now it's a genre that has gained a lot of respect for how it comments on the human experience.

0:58:15 SC: Yeah, I remember being... I loved Sinister, and I thought it was extremely scary and I'm not an aficionado by any means, but since then, The Babadook is an amazingly good movie and just now, we've started watching The Haunting of Hill House.

0:58:29 SD: We were just talking about that on the way here 'cause we saw the... Well, and by the way, we saw that of the billboard... And I asked Cargill, I said, have you heard anything? He said, "I hear it's very good." And it's Mike Flanagan. I tweeted about the release of that yesterday and I haven't seen it yet, but he is such a good director.

0:58:44 SC: So good.

0:58:44 SD: And he's so talented. And of course I've read the book, The Shirley Jackson novel is amazing and really scary.

0:58:51 SC: Yeah.

0:58:52 SD: Which goes back to the original Haunting, by Robert Wise, which was a great movie. And it's a... Now these kind of tales regardless of your cosmological view of... And regardless of your philosophical presuppositions about the existence of the immaterial world, or the existence of anything non material, these movies speak to our fears. They just do. The otherness of them.

0:59:23 SC: And in a movie like that and in the other... In movies you've made, there's obviously a supernatural element, but the response of the human characters to what they're seeing is what it would be, right?

0:59:33 SD: Right.

0:59:34 SC: That's what counts. I would totally feel this way in this circumstance which I don't believe will ever happen because I'm an Atheist. But yeah.

0:59:40 SC: If it did, that's how I would feel. That's what matters right?

0:59:42 SD: Oh. Yeah, and it's funny because I think that even if you're right and I'm wrong, about the nature of the universe, the likelihood of something coming along in the course of history that undoes all of our safe assumptions about the nature of the world is going to be frightening. That will... Like that encountering that will be scary.

1:00:08 SC: Exactly.

1:00:09 SD: And I think it's... I think one of my favorite things I remember hearing you talk about is how these sort of big revelations in science are typically non-intuitive.

1:00:20 SC: Yeah, that's right.

1:00:21 SD: And relativity, I mean, what could be more non-intuitive than relativity? And it takes so much effort just to try to conceptualize and understand what that even is and the fact that somebody figured it out to me, is still incredible. I still don't understand how that happened.

1:00:38 SC: And honestly quantum mechanics is a 100 times worse. The opening line of my new book is going... I hope is right now, something like, "You don't need a PhD in Theoretical Physics to be afraid of quantum mechanics, but it doesn't hurt."

1:00:50 SD: Oh, see, that's great. And I just think that it all gets back to the mystery of the unknown. And I think that that's something where you and I have always had an unspoken overlapping respect, which is, there's a lot that we know, but there's so much that we don't know. And there's so much that's still out there to surprise us.

1:01:14 SC: Yeah, that's right.

1:01:15 SD: And that's so much of the human experience, not just when it comes to knowledge and what we know and what we believe about the universe, but that's our day-to-day experience. Life surprises us.

1:01:28 SC: Right.

1:01:29 SD: And it scares us, and it does, it throws us these curve balls. And I think that this particular realm of visual storytelling is a great way to reckon with those fears.

1:01:40 SC: Yeah.

1:01:40 SC: And you've made a couple of movies about exorcisms.

1:01:43 SD: Yeah.

1:01:43 SC: And correct me if I'm wrong, but you think that this is a real thing, right? I mean, that there... It is at least plausible let's say, possession.

1:01:48 SD: Well, yeah... Well, here's the interesting... It's funny 'cause I didn't expect you to bring that up, but now that you have, I'm really glad you did, because what I can say about it is, again, the primary word I would use to describe my own feeling about the phenomenon is mystery. There's a great mystery to it, but possession and exorcism is a fact, it's an anthropological reality that exists in all cultures and always have. People get into these crazy mindsets and start doing these things with certain predictable patterns and then there's this kind of shock therapy ritual that every culture has developed that is often very effective. And so, for me, that's the starting point, the starting point of what makes it so interesting isn't theological, it's anthropological.

1:02:36 SC: Right.

1:02:37 SD: You know, that this is a part of... This is something that happens and in fact...

1:02:40 SC: No one can deny that in the real world exorcists go to people's houses because they believe that they are possessed and things happen.

1:02:47 SD: Precisely. And I think that if... And I've read dozens of books on the subject and including very skeptical books, and I think at the very least, you have to... If you look at credible cases, when I say credible, I mean, well researched, well analyzed cases, and certainly when you look at it as a phenomenon globally and historically, I do think there is a trance state quality of it in the more extreme cases of what I would call a legitimate case. Is it the very least that.

1:03:20 SC: Right.

1:03:21 SD: And there in you are entering into something very mysterious about the human mind, at the very least.

1:03:27 SC: Yeah.

1:03:27 SD: And so, I found that compelling. And when I first made "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" I have an open and liberal enough view of scripture, for example, and in my own theological views of things, and I'm always challenging myself to question what I believe. One of the reasons I went into that was to see if, do I believe that there's anything behind this? Do I believe that the devil exists? Is it all just a construct? And in that particular case, what was so fascinating was by the time it was over, I didn't have any more answers that I went into going in, because there really didn't seem to be any simple way to explain what happened to that particular girl...

1:04:12 SC: Right.

1:04:12 SD: In that case. Like, no matter what angle I looked at it from, it was just confounding and that's why it sparked so much interesting conversation. But I will finish by saying that I think that the vast majority of what you see and hear out there, people attributing to being demon possession and the work of the devil, is nonsense. It's like, it's the vast majority of it is absolutely ridiculous. And in the more extreme cases, I could be wrong, maybe it's all some kind of psychological trance-state, but I personally, do I believe that there's a spiritual component behind it? I do.

1:04:53 SC: Yeah. And there's no question... Well, there's very little question, I guess, there's always some question, but it seems to be useful in describing human actions to believe in the existence of evil. Some things just are evil.

1:05:06 SD: Yeah.

1:05:06 SC: And how... And there's a lot of evil going on in your films, how would your films be different if tomorrow you became a naturalist?

1:05:16 SD: Oh, that's a really good question.

1:05:21 SC: And this obviously is not explicit.

1:05:22 SD: No, it's a really, really, really good question. I like to question a lot. I mean, it would be completely different, because they would be made from a completely different human experience. My spirituality, if I'm honest has been certainly scrutinized intellectually. I certainly take philosophy very seriously. I have changed a lot of what I believe, because of critical thinking and all of that, but if I'm honest, my core belief system is born of my experience. I wasn't raised in a religious home, but it has always been my nature from the time I was a small child to look around and feel the world as something that is much more than the material in front of me. I've always felt that the world was... That what was real was more than this and maybe what was primary was more than this. It was something else, not even more, but just something else that I've always experienced the world more immaterially than I have materially and that's just been my way of experiencing it and so I connect that that part of myself that experiences the world in that mystical kind of way I relate to cinema as a part of that. I relate to film experience as a viewer and as an artist is very, very connected to that. So I think that... And when it comes to philosophy where you would land much more with Hume, I'm gonna land much more with crazy Kant.

1:07:02 SC: Oh, no sorry, that's the deal breaker and I don't know if we can get along anymore after that.

1:07:04 SD: Yeah, sorry I know. But I'm right with him when he says there's two things I'm sure about the stars above me, and the moral law within.

1:07:12 SC: Yeah.

1:07:12 SD: And so, I think that that... I do think that that belief in a moral law preexisting within human behavior or something, I do believe in, but if I were to become a naturalist and undo even that, I don't... I feel like suddenly this like... When you asked me that question, the honest answer is, Well I couldn't make any of the movies that I've made at all. Wiped the slate clean and what would I make? I'd have to live in another life and if that actually... And by the way, it's possible that something could happen that would make me think that way. And what would the result be? I think that all I could make movies about if that happened to me, at this point in my life, all I could make movies about art was that.

1:08:00 SC: Is that. Right.

1:08:00 SD: About...

1:08:00 SC: Such a profound thing.

1:08:00 SD: About the shock value of experiencing life for so long, as in, so powerfully for five decades, and then to suddenly have the rug pulled out from under you. You know?

1:08:10 SC: No, I think that's perfectly fair and vice versa. If I had a conversion experience tomorrow...

1:08:15 SD: Yeah, Oh my god, what are you gonna do?

1:08:16 SC: I would not be able to write about quantum mechanics anymore and it would be the most important in your life, right?

1:08:20 SD: And this makes me such a bad Christian too, because I hear you say that and I'm like, "Oh God, I hope that doesn't happen to Sean." [laughter] Absolutely, I like Sean the way he is.

1:08:26 SC: The world is more interesting with the variety, right? Yeah.

1:08:29 SD: That's exactly right.

1:08:29 SC: No, we're not trying to convert each other. That's a good thing. But, it does... I think that the relationship with mystery is an interesting thing. You brought it up. Mystery is crucially important to all movies.

1:08:42 SD: Yeah.

1:08:42 SC: To all storytelling, to human existence etcetera, etcetera. I was really annoyed by the famous JJ Abrams mystery box TED Talk. Did you see his TED talk?

1:08:51 SD: Yeah, I did. I did see it.

1:08:53 SC: And part of it, and maybe I'm being unfair, but part of it seemed to be... And maybe we'll disagree about this, that he was saying that mysteries are better if, are better, best, only good if you don't even try to solve them in some sense. If you assume that they're not solvable, and keep them as mysteries. And to me, mysteries are great because they can be solved. I go through life presuming that of course there's a million questions I don't know the answers to, and I will die before I know all the answers to them, but in principle, I could get them. And that's what makes the quest worthwhile.

1:09:25 SD: Well, certainly when you're talking about the mysteries of the material world and the mysteries of science that's a given. What we don't know about dark matter and dark energy and these things, and gravity, these things that science is still chasing, of course, we have to believe that they can be answered that those mysteries can be answered. And just as relativity changed our human experience of the world and I'm sure future discoveries and quantum mechanics is already starting to do that as it seeps out into popular culture, it's starting to affect the way that we feel most... A lot of times in very sloppy ways and stories, I know. But I think that when you're talking about mystery, the mystery of human experience and the mystery of say, the mystery of God of the concept of God, the mystery of meaning. To me, there's always a quest to comprehend it. There's always a quest to get deeper underneath it. That is the point. I don't believe that there's power in just acknowledging, "Oh, it's a mystery. We'll never know." Well, if that's the case, I don't need to think about it. I love... I don't remember where I first heard this, but I've repeated it before, maybe I said and...

1:10:54 SD: I don't really don't remember. But it's certainly, something I think about a lot, which is that, to me, the concept of mystery is not the presence of something meaningless, but the presence of more meaning than we can yet comprehend? That there's an awareness of, there's more here than we can get our experience or our brains or our hearts around. And the whole point of evolving as a species evolving as an individual is to get deeper into that mystery, start to understand it. Just, what's there? What is it... What is it therefore? And I think that the important thing to me though that is worth protecting, and I didn't particularly agree with JJ's approach on the mystery box either, but what I do believe, with respect to mystery is that we have to make a practiced, kind of discipline to not think that we understand more than we do. I think that...

1:11:53 SC: Oh, yeah. Sure.

1:11:53 SD: I think that's really important. And I think it's important because I think... And I've said this many times before, but I think both science and religion have been guilty, and have continued to be guilty, of propagating the idea that we understand a lot more than we really understand, and they've both done it in very different ways, but they're broadcasting a sensibility to their constituents that we got the world figured out.

1:12:21 SC: Well, one of the terrible things about the way that we teach kids sciences is that we teach it as a set of facts that we've learned, rather than as a process for making hypotheses and then testing them against reality.

1:12:31 SD: That statement alone is something that people don't understand.

1:12:36 SC: Yeah.

1:12:36 SD: People don't think of science as a process, they don't.

1:12:40 SC: It's not that hard. They could do it better.

1:12:41 SD: They think of is irrevocable fact, that's it. And... Well, and sometimes it is revoked.

1:12:47 SC: Oh yeah. Exactly, to anyone who knows their history.

1:12:48 SD: It's like... Exactly, that's... The whole history of science has been a process of it undercutting itself as it gets deeper into it. It's understanding of how complex the world really is.

1:13:00 SC: Alright, we can move into the lightning round, 'cause I know that you have to go to see your horror house, right?

1:13:03 SD: Yes, yeah, I'm meeting my kids at Katsuya, then we're going to... We're gonna go to the Warner Brothers horror tour.

1:13:12 SC: Very consistent.

1:13:12 SD: Yes.

1:13:12 SC: Excellent in philosophical approach. So... But then, very quickly, 'cause I do wanna talk about... You're not just a director, but you are a lover of cinema and the history of cinema. What is your relationship to that history, and what would you recommend to our listeners out there in podcast land? Should they download Kurosawa on Netflix?

1:13:33 SD: Such a great question. My relationship to it is that, I first learned movies from my father, primarily, 'cause he was a movie lover, but he was straight genre. Not horror either, but he just loved action movies, he loved thrillers and so I grew up seeing tons of movies, American movies. We see two, three movies a day, sometimes in our family.

1:13:55 SC: That's great.

1:13:55 SD: And so I developed a real love for movies and then, of course, when video technology came in, I started to rewatch movies all the time. But then when I got to college, I was exposed to international cinema and it was really my discovery of the art of international cinema that made me really wanna be a filmmaker, because I... The first time that I saw Fellini's 8 1/2, I just... I actually had a panic attack at the end of the movie. The density of that experience, the dream quality of that film was so overwhelming, I kinda panicked. I had literally left the classroom, because I couldn't understand...

1:14:34 SC: Immersive experience.

1:14:35 SD: I couldn't understand what was happening to me, in my brain, in this experience. And then, as I continued to rewatch it, the layers of meaning and poetry in that movie were so amazing, I didn't know, like, "Movies can do this?" And so that sent me really down the rabbit hole of exploring all the major movements in world cinema, starting in the silent era in American Cinema, going all the way through the various major movements, to... And it was primarily Japanese cinema and European art cinema, the French New Wave and Italian realism, these things really spoke to me. And Kurosawa is a great point for people who have limited exposure to international cinema. Kurosawa's was a great starting point, because he took, I think, the sensibility of Hollywood movies, the entertainment value of Hollywood movies, and merged it with the artfulness of European movies of his time. He was as much a fan of John Ford as he was of Ingmar Bergman, and so there's a quality to his movies that are high art and high entertainment at the same time, that you really don't get with many directors, ever. And so he's a great starting point. Watch the... Just Google "The ten best Kurosawa movies" and every one of them will be a masterpiece worth watching.

1:16:00 SD: But you also have to find directors that you love. It's like Godard, Jean-Luc Godard is not for everybody, but for those of us who love those moves, or Bergman, Bergman movies... You and I, it was so interesting, I would love to watch a Bergman film with you, because he really believed in a godless universe, he believed in no God or, if there is a God, it is certainly silent, certainly non-communicative, we are alone. And even though I've never held that view, I experience his experience of the world through those movies so powerfully, and this is what movies can do, I think, again, in ways that other art forms don't, is they can... Well, other art forms do the same thing, but for me, movies do it in a way nothing else does. I feel that experience, I feel like his human experience through those movies, and I am made more human for having felt it and for having understood it, and having related to the truth quality in it, because even though I have a system of belief that is different than that, I know what it's like to feel alone in the world. I know what it's like to not feel safe in the world, and I know what's certainly, what it's like to be wracked with doubt, which, a lot of his films were about as well.

1:17:19 SC: And I think that's something that we both agree on, and probably Bergman would agree with us, is that the question of whether or not God exists matters.

1:17:26 SC: It quite elevate...

1:17:26 SD: That's exactly, exactly. No, I think that's exactly right. And I think that we live in an age now of just shouting, people, everybody shouting at each other. And one of the things I love is being able to have conversations like this and hear something like that from somebody like you, that that question is an important question, it's a profound question, it's one of the essential questions, and it needs to be reckoned with now. And that's more important than, to me, hearing that is a much more important voice than anybody advocating why they believe what they believe. You know, the starting point is we all need to deal with certain realities, we have to answer certain questions if we are to live a full life an enlightened life, we should. We should be... We should have an understanding of what we think the human experience really is.

1:18:20 SC: Okay, two more questions. The lightning round. For whatever reason, you're told that you can make one more movie ever in your life, what would it be? You're allowed to change your mind later but...

1:18:35 SD: Well... It would be the next movie that I'm going to make, but I can't say anything about it.

1:18:43 SC: That's fair.

1:18:44 SD: Is that a safe answer?

1:18:45 Robert Cargill: That is the correct answer.

1:18:46 SD: That is the correct answer. We've made everybody happy. You're gonna make a movie... Good.

1:18:50 SC: Yeah. No, and it's true...

1:18:50 SD: That's you're living the life.

1:18:53 SD: And I do believe in it because I made one decision early in my career, to take a big studio movie because that's what you do when you're a young filmmaker, if you get the opportunity, you take it. And I ended up regretting that decision and since then, I've always operated under the belief that I should make every movie as though it's my last movie.

1:19:15 SC: Good. Yeah.

1:19:15 SD: Because one day it will be.

1:19:16 SC: Exactly. Right, that's...

1:19:18 SD: And you never know when that's gonna happen.

1:19:20 SC: Well do you believe in the afterlife? I've presumed that there're directors in heaven or hell. I don't know.

1:19:25 RC: I don't wanna go to hell.

1:19:25 SC: Maybe there are... There're producers in hell maybe. I don't know...

1:19:26 SD: Yeah that's right. Yeah that's right. That's what it is. Humphrey Jennings is in hell. Writers and directors... Directors go to Limbo, writers go to heaven.

1:19:34 RC: That's correct. [laughter]

1:19:36 SC: Alright, and the last one is you are out there on Twitter...

1:19:40 SD: Yeah.

1:19:40 SC: Pissing people off, saying things... I mean, you don't try to piss people off. I don't think that's your goal, but you're happy to say things, truthfully, honestly, right? And I'm on Twitter also where people always debate, it's not Twitter in particular, but just... Should we all just shut up, should we protect ourselves, should we lower the noise level and just not talk, but I find it very stimulating. I try to put people in my Twitter feed who are rewarding.

1:20:12 SD: Yeah.

1:20:12 SC: I like people who talk about Twitter is just a source of terrible things. I'm like you get to choose who you follow.

1:20:17 SD: Yeah.

1:20:17 SC: So what is your relationship with that sort of more social aspect of your job.

1:20:21 SD: I left Twitter for a couple of months just to feel the noise kind of calm down and to reevaluate my belief. And then I came back. And I came back because I do value it, I do find it to be rewarding both by controlling my Twitter feed and who it is that I'm actually going to listen to and having the list of people who in a particular mood, or I wanna see what this list has to say today.

1:20:52 SC: Sometimes I just want to hear about the NBA...

1:20:54 SD: You're right. Right. Exactly. But I think as a user it's certainly been enlivening in that I've met a lot of great people as a result of it. I've made a lot of good connections, but I love it as a form of expression, I'm not out there to try to influence anybody or change anybody's mind about anything, so I'm not trying to... I don't wanna shout into the void about what I'm angry about and I've tweeted plenty about Trump but usually just because it's an expression of, "This is how I am feeling today about this lunatic."

1:21:28 SC: And express it back.

1:21:29 SD: Yeah, and I also am scaling back on that. I'm trying to do less and less of that, but I love it as just an opportunity to express what I think and feel about things and for me, it's usually cinema and a little bit with politics, but Cargill when I spoke about this last night and Cargill has been actively using his Twitter feed to tweet specifically about writing about the craft of writing and he was saying to me... 'Cause I said to him last night, I said what do you think I should be doing differently with my feed because I am getting a little bored with the whole world of it, and he was encouraging me to tweet more about the craft of directing.

1:22:08 SC: Yeah.

1:22:08 SD: And I thought, "You know, that's really true because no one's doing that and I can do that and I think that that will have value and I think I'll enjoy it and I love teaching and that's something where I can actually give valuable information that very few people have and nobody on Twitter is really doing that.

1:22:24 SC: Well, it makes perfect sense, maybe, but it seems like there's a vibrant screenwriting Twitter in a way that there's not a vibrant directing in Twitter.

1:22:31 SD: Absolutely true. Yeah, absolutely true, I think, and I think that's unfortunate, I think it should be that way, I think there should be a better...

1:22:41 RC: If I can chime in for a second.

1:22:42 SC: You can.

1:22:42 SD: C. Robert Cargill ladies and gentlemen.

1:22:44 RC: You take a medium in which you're supposed to write and then you put writers in it, and what do you expect?

1:22:47 SC: Yeah. That's the... I'm married to a journalist, they cannot stop on Twitter. Yes. Scientists are much more reluctant but alright, that all makes a lot of sense. This is extraordinarily fun and insightful. So Scott Derrickson thanks so much for being on my podcast.

1:23:01 SD: Oh, my pleasure Sean. Thank you.

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