Full transcript: Robert McKee on London Real
5:03 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Robert McKee who has lectured on storytelling for three decades and whose book story is the Bible for screenwriters, TV writers and entertainment executives like myself. Your former students include 63 Academy Award winners, 164 Emmy Award winners and 30 Writers Guild of America Award winners with names like Peter Jackson of the Hobbit trilogy, the actor Kirk Douglas, the author Steven Pressfield and the entire team at Pixar singing your praises. You were famously played by Brian Cox in the film adaptation when Nicholas Cage and have also appeared on The Simpsons. Your book dialogue, the art of verbal action for page, stage and screen was released last year to critical acclaim and your book character is coming soon I hope. I will be attending your three-day story seminar this weekend in London. I’ve got my Casablanca screenplay printed out. Robert, welcome to London Real.
6:04 Robert McKee: Thank you Brian. Thank you very much.
6:06 Brian Rose: You are no stranger to this city and I was wondering if you could tell us about the time you spent here and what London means to story, theater, everything.
6:17 Robert McKee: Oh my love affair with London goes back in the mid 60s. I was artist in residence at the National Theater when it was at the Old Vic and Olivier was artistic director and I remember I flew what we used to call Icelandic Airlines and Storm Door Company.
6:33 We flew from New York to Maine to Helsinki, I mean to Iceland and then on to London. Just to get here. Yeah, just to get here. And I got in a cab and I was driving into the city and I was bouncing up and down in the backseat of the cab screaming at the driver things like, is that the Thames? Is that the Thames? Is the actual Thames? Is that Big Ben?
7:06 And I was just, you know, could have been more electrified by it. And then some years later I moved here and I lived in London and then I bought a place in Bar’s Castle, Cornwall. And I had for a decade I had the ideal life of city country going back and forth, two weeks one place, two weeks and the next. And it was a beautiful life. And the reason I would want to live in London, I would do it again if it were possible, is the theater.
7:52 I grew up in the theater. I spent my first half of my professional life on stage and directing theater. And the theater in London is just the best in the world. New York is fine. I’m sure Paris is fine but there’s virtually no comparison.
8:10 When I go to plays in New York, this is really pet peeve-ish but it’s fact, I understand 60, 70 percent of what is said from the stage because American actors don’t ask about TV signs and when I come to London people pronounce their final consonants. You know, English is a consonant language. And so you can understand what is being said because they’re trained. And the acting overall is always great. So I love this town. It’s the most, I think it’s, I think London is beautiful, physically beautiful. I know this sounds blasphemous, but I think London is far more beautiful than Paris. Paris is repetitious. I mean every street looks like every other street after a while. And London is, especially when it’s up lit at night, it’s just breathtaking. And the change from neighborhood to neighborhood is rich and history of all kinds and modern and English architects are superb. And the new buildings are beautiful. So I have a laundry list of reasons why if I could I would live here.
9:50 Brian Rose: And we’ll speak to your wife and get you over here half a year. Do you think the history of theater here produces different kinds of actors then when it comes to it?
10:03 Robert McKee: You know, it used to, but it’s not true anymore. When I was working in the theater here in the 60s, there was clearly Rada, Lambda trained actors had the voice, you know. And it was difficult for them in many cases to work on screen because they just couldn’t get small enough.
10:25 You know, because an act, I mean both actors start with the same. They bring a character to life within, but the stage actor gathers up that creation and projects it into the audience. The film actor creates within and then invites the camera toward them to look inside. And as a film actor, you don’t want to do anything that would push the camera away from you. Whereas in the theater it’s the opposite. And a lot of Brits when I was here in the 60s just didn’t know how to throw the switch, but not anymore. I mean the quality of acting in the world, certainly in the English speaking world, is breathtaking, I think.
11:09 I mean, you know, when you go to a play or a new TV series comes on, and they’re wonderful. You go, who are these people? You know? And they come from the same line a hundred deep at every audition. And they are so beautifully prepared to act roles that will never be written for them.
11:32 I mean, the art of writing is decades behind the art of acting. And these wonderful actors, thanks to the development of long form television, when I saw Game of Thrones and The Vikings, I looked at those casts and I thought all those guys who thought they were retired, all those old men, veterans of the stage, are now playing all these wonderful characters in these series. And so I do my best to try to keep the quality of writing progressively building over the time. And thanks to long form television now, the number of really fine characters available to actors is multiplying. And so, because the writing in long form television is just excellent. I mean, there’s a lot of crap too, but the best of the best is just breathtakingly wonderful stuff. I mean from The Wire to Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones indeed and all that. And so
12:58 I’m very optimistic because I think regarding the future of writing, because I think long form television is going, they’re already doing it, these writers are building the cathedrals of the 21st century, a hundred hours of, you know, when I do television day, which I do on Thursday, a couple days from now, we look at Breaking Bad as 26 storylines. Between the 26 storylines there are 205 acts, I mean that’s 205 act work. The magnitude is just astounding. And that was Breaking Bad, I think it was 86 hours. So I mean a novel, even a 900,000 page novel might be one season. And now you have seven, eight, ten seasons of often really superb quality writing. And this I think is going to, I’m hoping, will invite really ambitious writers with visions of able to encompass massive works like that, will inspire them to want to write. Because I know, you know, writing a novel is a lot of work and iffy. Writing for the stage, again, iffy. Writing for a screen, you make more money if you sell, but how many, you know, most screenwriters who are really good and really busy are getting something to the screen like once every five years. That’s, you know, it’s hard. Hard to survive on. Hard to survive. And they’re hard to keep your love of it, your enthusiasm going. The Writers Guild did a study once that for every 20 screenplays for which serious money is paid to option the screenwrites, only one ever gets made. So there’s a lot of writers, I was one of them in Hollywood for years,
15:30 Living on option money, selling what you write regularly, but then watching it perish for various reasons.
15:38 Brian Rose: Which must crush you as a writer to see it not be made.
15:43 Robert McKee: Yeah, it does, but there’s one screenplay I sold five times. This is a wonderful business. You get to sell things and keep them. People just love this script and it never gets made. Last time it was sold a couple years ago, optioned. I called my lawyer and I said, they want to, got another deal. He said, another one. I said, yeah. I said, you know, people read it, they come all over it, but nobody ever gets pregnant.
16:15 Brian Rose: Well said. So is this an unheard of time in human history when it comes to this long-form story?
16:23 Robert McKee: I think so. We’ve never written or even overly told stories before.
16:28 We’ve never attempted that kind of magnitude before.
16:32 Brian Rose: Does the Bible compare to say a Breaking Bad series?
16:37 Robert McKee: No, the Bible is a bunch of little short stories. And there’s no through line. It keeps changing authors every 20 pages. So now it’s of a magnitude nobody’s ever imagined before.
16:51 And consequently, there’s a, what’s essential in long-form television is complexity of character. What keeps an audience watching a TV series is one of two things. Either characters are being revealed as human beings of a kind we never saw in the last three years. You know, a long, suddenly a character does something and you realize, my God, that is true to character, but we’ve never seen that quality, that trait in that character before. They’re being revealed and or changed. Characters are acting better or descending into some degenerative state or whatever, but they’re changing for better or for worse. And as long as the characters are being revealed and or changed, because not all characters change, but those who do, are fascinated. It really isn’t the storytelling that pulls people through a hundred hours of a long-form television. I mean, the storytelling is wonderful, but you know, but the Sopranos, for example, you know, ends with him and his family sitting in a restaurant because he’s been totally revealed. Tony’s never going to change. The Tonys of this world never change. And everything knowable about him is known. Their end of series.
18:14 Brian Rose: Right. You call that exhaustion.
18:16 Robert McKee: That’s the character exhaustion.
18:18 Brian Rose: And you said that kind of revealed you a new way of ending something.
18:24 Robert McKee: Yeah. Until the Sopranos, I never realized that when it gets to this kind of length, this kind of complexity, complication, that what we’re really watching for is character. I think this is true of many novels, too. I mean, a lot of novels, the last chapter is not a real true climax. It’s a sort of fade out. And the characters are exhausted. And so when I saw Sopranos, I realized that’s another way to end the story. Just, they’re emptied out.
18:57 Thank you very much. Been wonderful knowing you. Goodbye.
19:01 Brian Rose: And when I think about Breaking Bad, I mean, Walter White, you’re constantly seeing these new aspects of his character and he’s changing and Jesse’s changing and his relationship with his wife. And you’re saying that’s what pulls us along. Not the next drug deal, not the next this or that.
19:22 Robert McKee: No. No. I mean, there are arcs. And in fact, it gets so complicated in long form TV that, as I said, there’s 205 acts. So after a while, an act is important, but not that important. So I had to devise a new term that I call movements, which is an act is a major turning point.
19:41 A story climax is an absolute turning point. So between the act and the story climax, created a movement, which is a massive turning point, which usually means some kind of compound. Not only did the character survive life and death, but he’s now the kingpin of whatever and is found love. And I mean, a movement climax is more powerful than an act, usually because it compounds change. So it’s not just one kind of change, two or three different kinds of change all happening in the same event. And so it becomes a movement. So I broke Breaking Bad into four movements in order to make sense out of this, because, you know, like I said, 26 storylines and 205 acts, and you get lost in the forest.
20:31 Brian Rose: And literally, and this is something you saw coming, I think 10 or 15 years ago, when you looked at the state of screenwriting and you said, evil is the thing that hasn’t really been explored about people. And I know a lot of your students went on to write some of these things like Sopranos and the wire and some of these other things. Am I summarizing?
20:56 Robert McKee: Yeah, well, that’s true. It’s true. I mean, you can’t have complexity of character necessary to sustain 80, 90, 100 hours of storytelling without moral contradiction. I mean, if people are just, you know, good people versus bad people, that’s not going to last very long. I mean, that’s a feature film. That’s Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. And so you need people, characters with tremendous inner conflicts, and there’s various kinds of inner
21:27 Conflicts, but the most compelling are moral conflicts, of course. And I don’t know, it’s a chicken and egg thing, whether characters with deep moral conflicts led to the development of long form, or long form developed characters with compound moral conflicts because they needed complex characters. So I remember going back to the wire. The wire is, you know, two worlds of police and the criminals, and you don’t know who the good guys are. And definitely, you know, the bad guys turned good when you least expected. So the complexity of those characters and their moral contradictions were multiple. And so they became, you know, and the cast of that, the wire was fantastic, and then came Six Feet Under, Mad Men, and so forth. And characters like Don Draper and Mad Men is a profoundly complicated, self-contradictory, moral mess who’s trying to figure out, you know, he’s going through what we used to call an existential crisis, trying to figure out what the point of it all is and who he is, and he’s capable of telling any lie and breaking, betraying anybody, and on it goes. And so…
22:50 Brian Rose: And we’re fascinated that because deep down inside we know that something may be like us. Is that why we tune in?
22:57 Robert McKee: Oh, we wouldn’t tune in from day one if we didn’t recognize that. I mean, that’s empathy and that’s absolute in principle characters. And it happens without thought. I mean, it’s not like an audience that’s there thinking, that character is somehow human like me, and so I want him to have whatever he wants because, you know, if I were that character in those circumstances, I’d want the same thing. That makes it sound like that.
23:24 They just sense a thing, that this is a human being. And it’s amazing how, you know, and then somebody else walks in the room and you go, not me. I mean, you’re not going to empathize with that character. And I could lecture about it and I could define it and I can give examples, but from character to character, from story to story, why readers or audiences find a particular character empathetic and someone else not, is there’s some kind of one-off going on between the character and the particular person who’s reading it or watching it.
24:10 When two sensitive, intelligent people watch the same film and have two entirely opposite reactions, it’s got nothing to do with the film or the novel or whatever. It has everything to do with empathy. The one who liked it empathized. The one who didn’t, didn’t. Why one did and one didn’t? Who can say? But it’s that. It’s empathy. So that has to hook them, you know, from the pilot episode or from the first 10, 15 minutes of the film, the first chapter of a novel.
24:48 You have to feel there’s a shared humanity. You must have empathy to have a successful anything, any type of story. Well, yeah, there are exceptions. I don’t think there’s any empathy in Agatha Christie. I mean, we sympathize with the Miss Marples and the Sherlock Holmes as a master detective, you know, sympathetic characters, but you don’t actually empathize with the master detective because they’re superhuman. They never screw up. They always get whoever. And so they’re beyond empathy, but they’re charming. They’re sympathetic. You like them, but you don’t empathize with them. So there’s always an exception, but generally, yeah, without empathy.
25:35 There are films or books that you might read to the end just to get the answer to the question, how does this turn out? Certainly certain thrillers or crime stories, you know, you may or may not empathize, but your curiosity gets you to turn the pages. And so there’s always exceptions, but generally, no, without empathy, there’s no involvement. And in something serial, like a television series, they’re not going to be back next week. And from season to season, they’re certainly not going to be back next year without empathy.
26:15 Brian Rose: I mean I can’t wait for Game of Thrones to get back, because we don’t watch them one a week, we collect them, we do what it must be, I’m sure. We wait until the season and then we binge, right?
26:31 Robert McKee: There must be 15, 20 characters in Game of Thrones I empathize with. I mean practically, no one there I don’t empathize with, you know. Same thing in the Michael Hirst’s marvelous series, The Vikings. Again, there’s a multitude of empathetic characters on both sides of the battles. And people get, because of empathy is so powerful, and it builds in long form. In a film, you empathize for two hours and it’s over, right? And in long form, season after season, these people become your friends, you worry about them, you think about them more than you do your friends. It’s strange out there.
27:21 Brian Rose: So yeah, yeah, that’s primal. I was wondering if you can talk to the basics of story, because a lot of people watch this and say, I’m not a screenwriter, I’m not an author, story’s not important to me. And yet, story, I believe, affects everything about the human experience. And I was wondering if you could explain that concept, because when I read your book, Story.
27:51 Robert McKee: Yeah, well, just, I mean, just the, there’s this ancient and false dichotomy between story and character. You know, when Aristotle wrote poetics, he said, story number one is the most creative, most difficult aspect of the work, character number two.
28:12 But then by the end of the 19th century, people who had it inverted, no characters number one, story number two. The truth is, there’s no difference. Character is story. Story is character. Because the way in which you come to understand a character and feel empathy and involvement is by watching them make choices under pressure to take one action versus the many different actions they could have taken. But they choose a particular action as a tactic, an effort to get what they want at that moment and overall what they want out of life. When they take an action and they get a reaction from their world, we call that an event. And so characters take actions and the world reacts to them. That’s story. Story is the actions that the characters choose to take and the consequences of those actions. And so story is character. Character is story. And so when somebody says story is not important to me, character is, well, that’s what they’re not aware of is in fact they’re gripped by the story because they’re fascinated by the character who makes those kind of choices in those circumstances and takes those actions and suffers the consequences or benefits, whatever. And as they watch this character in life interact, that’s story.
29:40 But often, the difference is that often these actions and reactions are within a character. They act and react within themselves. Why did I do that or grade or whatever? And it’s not a car crash. The car crash happened inside of the character, so to speak, right?
30:07 When it’s internalized like that, people tend to think that’s not story. That’s character because it’s going on inside of the character. But of course, it’s story taking place inside of character. And all great writers, like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and the great stream of conscious writers understood that the stream of consciousness is a dynamic of choices and actions, choices and actions, all happening within the mind of a character.
30:36 Brian Rose: Okay. And why is that story important to us? I mean, you’ve probably quoted John Lawson saying story is created within the subjective and the objective realm collide and that this is actually like equipment for living. But a lot of humans, I don’t think realize.
30:53 Robert McKee: It’s not important that they do.
30:55 Brian Rose: Okay. It’s not important. But I found it fascinating when you broke it down in the first couple chapters.
31:00 Robert McKee: It’s only important to writers. Really?
31:02 This is technique and this is theory and this is understanding the art form, which is important to writers. But you don’t need audiences or readers turning pages or sitting in the theater analyzing the action reaction and the subtextual behaviors of characters versus their textual. That’ll hurt the story. That’ll destroy their experience.
31:28 Brian Rose: Okay. But story itself makes us who we are as humans, creates nations, creates movements. That whole idea of a fictional universe makes us do the things that help us cooperate with each other, things like that, right?
31:44 Robert McKee: Well, yes, because storytelling, story is a metaphor for life. That’s what was Kenneth Burke, you quoted, who said stories are equipment for living. And so story on one level is teaching us what life is, to prepare us, to equip us, so that when the sort of thing that happens to that character happens to me, I have some sense of what that is about. In fact, this is as old as the time, the Aristotle. Aristotle in the poetics talked about the rational experience of a play and the emotional experience of a play. He separated them. And the emotional experience he called catharsis.
32:32 And that’s what everybody’s written about. But he also said there’s a rational experience and that the deepest pleasure of the theater is learning without being taught.
32:48 And you go to a great play, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, you go to a great play, a great film, read a great novel, and you are learning what life is for these characters and these circumstances without being taught. You’re absorbing life through these stories so that you can be hopefully a little wiser, a little more temperate, a little more civilized, and a little more prepared for the catastrophes which will come. And so without storytelling, I mean, we would be utterly uncivilized.
33:26 So the subject matter is life. Right now in my country, here too in England, but in my country, the tensions, the suspicions between people, I mean every time I pull into a garage I think oh there’s a guy who voted for Trump. And he sees me coming in my jag and he goes there’s a guy who voted for Hillary. And we’re already enemies and he hasn’t even filled my tank up yet. Right?
34:16 And so the stress is really compounding. And I gave a little talk some time ago and I said that’s one way to look at it, the nod it puts in your belly every morning when you read the New York Times. The other way to look at it is subject matter. Because I was talking to a roomful of writers. So I said just get yourselves together. You don’t have to write politically. But this is going to affect families. It’s going to affect love relationships. It’s going to affect children.
34:43 It’s going to affect bossy employees. Everything is going to be affected by the, we now have a madman in the presidency. And therefore the experience in America is going to be, unlike it’s ever been. It’s subject matter. For comedy, for drama, for whatever. I said so you know just get out there and take advantage of it. Right?
35:09 Brian Rose: And it’s important work now more than ever.
35:12 Robert McKee: Exactly. Somebody’s got to tell the truth.
35:14 Brian Rose: Is Trump a good storyteller?
35:16 Robert McKee: No he’s not a good storyteller.
35:18 Brian Rose: He must have been if he’s president.
35:20 Robert McKee: I don’t know where people get these ideas.
35:22 He’s a bullshitter. That’s not storytelling. It’s bullshitting. Okay? He’s a bullshitter.
35:30 You know he’s from the business world, real estate business you know. You know look any TV commercial is a compound of two things. Bragging and promising. We’re the biggest, we’re the best, we’re the newest, we’re going to do this for you, we’re going to do this for you. You’re going to get sick of how happy you’re going to be. Right?
35:52 I mean it’s bragging and promising. That’s a TV commercial. He is a walking television commercial. He brags and he promises. Brags and he promises. That’s not storytelling. That’s bullshitting.
36:05 The story has its feet in the clay of truth. I mean it’s sliding through the swamps of what is.
36:12 Brian Rose: Okay but someone’s buying it. But somebody’s buying the bullshit. And the story narrative of his life, whether I understand what you mean by commercials, but the narrative of his life story which he wrote and rewrote, there is something there that people see I think.
36:30 Robert McKee: Yes but it’s bullshit.
36:32 Probably yes. He was born rich. His father was a multi-millionaire, real estate guy. And the only thing important that apparently ever happened to Trump was his older brother became alcoholic and killed himself with booze. Right? And that was a lesson. And so he’s a teetotaler. And I just wish he’d get drunk once in a while. Just maybe it would stir some insight in him. Because there is, you know, in Vino Veritas, but he doesn’t know truth.
37:08 Anyway, it’s terrible. It’s like the tale of two cities. The best of times and the worst of times. And it is.
37:17 Brian Rose: Terrible but good for business when it comes to writing. As in we need it.
37:23 Yes.
37:23 Brian Rose: Your book is called Story, but it’s for screenwriters. Is that correct? And can you talk about why you wrote it, some of the things I’ll be learning this weekend, and really the basis of why it’s so popular?
37:42 Robert McKee: I had a fight with my publisher over the title. My publisher was Judith Regan, who’s the queen of the bestsellers. And she wanted to call it screenwriting.
37:55 And I said, no, put screenwriting in the subtitle. I’m going to call it story. Because even though the majority of examples are taken from film, there’s an occasional play or novel, a TV show that gets mentioned. Excuse me. But it is primarily for screenwriters, technically. But the substance of it is true for everybody. Documentary. I mean, you mentioned all the awards that my students have won, but they’ve also won bookers and Pulitzer’s. And so yeah, the reason it’s used as examples primarily from screenwriting is because that’s what everybody knows.
38:45 And if I try to write a book called Story for a subtitle, the substance structure and style, the art of playwriting, and all of my examples were Tennessee Williams and John Osborne or somebody. No one’s seen them. Exactly. But now the book on dialogue is out, and that is for page, stage, and screen. And from now on, everything I write is going to be multi-confessional that way.
39:18 I’ll take examples from all the media of storytelling. Character will certainly be all the media. And because I think these, I’ve always felt this when I was teaching at universities, that there was something really artificial about a theater department, an English literature department, a film department, that all these people should be talking together. They should be working together and helping inspire each other’s work and that it’s all story at the end of the day. And then they separate by medium when they go to put it on stage or put it in front of a camera. But the heart and soul of it is the same. And how the story gets to the world is filtered and influenced by the medium it’s in. And certain stories are stronger on page than they are on screen, whatever. There are differences. But at the heart it’s all the same. And so I’m not going to let those academic departments determine what I do anymore. And so every book I’m going to write, I’m going to do one on comedy, I’m going to do one on love stories, and every book I write in the future will be for all three.
40:51 Brian Rose: What makes a good screenwriter?
40:53 Robert McKee: My favorite screenwriter is Ingmar Bergman. And there’s been, ever since Aristotle, there’s been a debate about form and content. And the form is critically important because without it you can’t express the content. And today, I think generally, storytelling is good. Certainly these masterpieces are
41:19 Long form TV are great. There’s some flawed films now and then. But even then, the problem is content today. Writers who just don’t have anything to say and they still want to write. And so they copy other people’s pieces and they look for a trend in genre and whatnot and just sort of redo thrillers again and again and again, whatever. What makes a great screenwriter is somebody with something to say, which is the same thing for a novel or a play. Because what difference does it make, how technically good you are as a screenwriter, if your material is Bainell and your characters have happened.
42:07 Brian Rose: You said an author has to write 10 things that fail at least.
42:12 Robert McKee: Probably 20s more, really. 20 like entire novels, screenplays. Yeah, well you know it’s going to take generally, when you look at the careers of most people who actually got success enough that we would know their name, it took them 10 years from their early 20s to their early 30s maybe or more until they finally got a novel published or play. If they were working hard, as they must be during those 10 years, and if it takes six months to write a quality play or novel or screenplay, that’s 20. If they, and I’m one of those writers who write slowly, if they write slowly it’s one a year, that’s 10. Failed works that nobody wants.
43:05 But it’s hard for people, but they’ll get it once they do it. What’s hard for people to realize is that the first thing you write will be the worst thing you will ever write. Because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And so you’re struggling and you’re trying to make whatever. And hopefully it’s good enough that you will not put a gun to your head, that you’ll do project novel number two, play number two, and keep going. But it’s going to take 10 failures to learn, to master this craft. Now there are people who make it sooner than that, congratulations. But 10 years, 10 failed works is normal. It’s normal. Because this is not a hobby, it’s an art form and a profession. And you have to give your life to it, so you’ve got to be willing to put in a decade of failure and hard work so that you have at least one major, if not two major works every year. And it gets better and better and better. I mean I’m always troubled by people who come to my lectures and they have this one script they want to write. I said, that’s very nice. Your uncle’s adventures in World War II, though very interesting.
44:32 But if it doesn’t get made, what are you going to do next? What’s your next project? And their eyes go blank. There is no next project, which means if it doesn’t happen, they’ll never write again. Which means they’re a dilettante, they really should leave the room.
44:49 Brian Rose: You’ve mentioned the sprays, the art of themselves or themselves in the art. That’s Stanislavski.
44:55 Robert McKee: Stanislavski said that.
44:57 Brian Rose: What did he mean by that?
44:58 Robert McKee: There’s two kinds of people in the arts. Those who love themselves in the art, they want to be in the theater. They want to be literary, they want to be in the movies, they want to be whatever.
45:10 They have a desire to be in one of these art forms because it’s romantic and it’s exciting and they want to be in the art. And then there are people who are fascinated by the art in themselves, who just have this monster inside of them called talent and the monster eats pages and if they’re not feeding that beast day in and day out, they’re miserable. And they’re obsessed with making sense out of life and foremost, they’re fascinated by people. Not genres, people. Whether they end up writing comedy or action or education plot as we call it.
45:59 Some story about somebody struggling to find meaning, whatever it’s about. That what got them into it, they discovered the story because what got them into the writing were characters. They had an imagination, they saw something on the street, something triggered and they just observe people and they have great self-knowledge. Because the truth is for every writer, every person, the only person you ever know is yourself and everybody else at a distance. And that’s why you need some maturity and experience to write the great work.
46:41 Yeah, as Chekhov once said, he said, everything I know about human nature I learned from me. And so you have to have self-awareness, penetrate the mysteries of your humanity, observe the people around you and great writers are fascinated by people and then they find them in situations and they make choices, things happen to them and they respond to that and story begins to grow. I mean that’s, I can’t know the numbers but that’s the majority, that’s 80% of writing.
47:15 It starts with a character, relationship and develops into a story. There are writers who start with an ending or an inciting incident or a great scene and then they build, they find characters and build story backward and forward from that inspiration, whatever it was. And the inspiration was something that happened rather than who this person is. And at the end of the day they end up with fascinating characters as well. So the order in which things happen is not important. But I think those writers who sustain a career and get better and better with everything they write are people fascinated with people.
47:59 Brian Rose: Can you spot those people a mile away? Will you see them on Friday on the course?
48:05 Robert McKee: No, because you know, I used to teach acting way back when I was an actor and when I needed to make a few fast bucks I taught acting and I taught at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. And we used to take 400 first year students and there’d be this person who couldn’t get up the steps onto the stage without falling on his face. And then there was this audition from somebody who had a voice and they, whatever, right? And what you learned is for the next two or three years that actor with the voice is never going to be any better.
48:44 That actor who fell down trying to get onto the stage is El Pacino. And so you just, you know, the famous book and cover thing, you know. So who would have, you know, I have no idea.
49:03 There are people who actually make an effort to look like a writer. I’m immediately suspicious.
49:12 Brian Rose: Okay. What does that look like? The sports jacket or the…
49:17 Robert McKee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The shovel. They’re English majors. Okay. You know, the grads, they’re, you know, getting an MFA in English Lit or something and there’s a certain look and certain haircut and
49:35 It’s a look. And I’m always worried about those people because I think, you know, you’re wearing your book on your outside. So, who knows. But you never know. You can’t tell.
49:49 Brian Rose: Okay. You know, Hollywood seems like a place where everyone sees themselves in the art. And like when I’m there, it feels like everyone wants to be there, to be there and to be on the screen. And that always seems like a different kind of energy in that city.
50:05 Robert McKee: Yeah, it is. You know, and when you meet, for example, makeup people and you ask them, you know, what did you think of this or that film? And they said it was the worst makeup I’ve ever seen, the best makeup, whatever.
50:19 I mean, all they see is makeup. And they are convinced that it’s the makeup that makes the difference. Everybody in that town has got, you know, but when we say everybody, I think there’s two and a half million, three million people in L.A. You know how many work in show business?
50:41 Twenty-five thousand. And you go to L.A. and you say, all these movie people are everywhere. There’s only twenty-five thousand of them inside of a city with two and a half million. That’s one percent. One percent.
50:55 Brian Rose: I thought it would be more.
50:57 Robert McKee: Well, because you go to certain coffee shops and you hang out and there they are. I mean, there’s your twenty-five thousand. But yeah, that’s it. Well, now I take that back. There’s only twenty-five thousand working at any one time. There’s probably a couple hundred thousand who want to work and do intermittently. But the working force of Hollywood on any one day is twenty-five thousand people from secretaries to producers.
51:27 But then there’s a lot of time off.
51:29 Brian Rose: Why are people going to show up this weekend for your marathon ten hour days of teaching, thirty hours straight? Why do they come to see you? You have a reputation in that course. You’ve been featured in movies by Mr. Brian Cox, who I know you were happy that he was going to play you because maybe he would portray you correctly.
51:52 Brian Rose: Is that what it’s like, that snippet and adaptation? And why do people come?
51:59 Robert McKee: No, it’s not like that. We had fun with that. I have spoken firmly to certain people who misbehave. I mean, you gather a couple hundred people, you know, the odds are pretty good that one of those people is the least out there listening to voices, none of which are mine, and they may misbehave. But mostly it’s just hard work. I mean, sessions are an hour and fifty minutes. On forty minutes. There’s five of them a day, three days in a row. And
52:40 I know why most of them will be there and I know what they will get. Most of them will have a work in progress. They are writers or somewhere at some point in their career, early, middle, eight, and they’re coming in there with something on their mind. And the lecture becomes a checklist for the rewrite. And so as I go through these points of all the components of their check listing that, comparing it to what they’re writing, taking notes on that, the notes they’re taking actually pertain to what they’re writing on that. Because they’ve got the book, for the, you know, if they want the points, my points on paper. So they come and they listen, and apparently they tell me that on Monday they’ve got a big leg up on a rewrite.
53:32 Then there are people who are there because they’re thinking about it. And they want to hear it, you know, from the, straight from the shoulder, tough, and they want the truth. They too have read the book, but there’s like, remember that film, Charlie Kaufman’s film, Being John Malkovich? There was a portal into Malkovich’s mind. Well I’m convinced there’s two portals into everybody’s mind. There’s two ways you get information you understand.
54:10 You read it and you hear it. And so people read my book and then they hear me lecturing these points and what they didn’t understand in the book suddenly becomes really clear. Or they hear me saying something that they don’t quite get, then they look it up and then they read it and they get it. It’s like, you know, between the two of them, real understanding takes place. I mean it’s just like when you were at the university, you had a lecture and a textbook. You needed them both.
54:40 So there’ll be people there for that reason. They want to have an immersion that will give them a sense of do I really want to do this or not. Then that’s half of them. People who are writing, people who are thinking about it. The other half are actors, directors, producers, film composers, editors, book editors, film editors. Everybody who has to read in order to do their job. And at some point in the production process, they are going to contribute to the storytelling. They’re going to edit it. They’re going to design a set. They’re going to act it, whatever. And the more they understand the art form, the better they can do their job.
55:34 And then of course often the actors especially have the ambition to write. And I’m with them on that because I think acting is the best preparation to write. Because they understand character. Yeah, because they have acted in quality material. And so when you’ve done scenes even, or let alone a whole play of Arthur Miller or Lillian Hellman or Terrence Raddigan, one of those great realist writers, as an actor, you know what fits the mouth and what doesn’t. You know what an honest action, reaction is. You know what’s repetitious rather than progressive because you’ve done these things. And these are superior writers. And so they set a standard for you.
56:26 And somebody, like I said, my favorite is Ymar Bergman because he’s the most visual screenwriter I know. And he grew up in the theater. And until he died he was always going back and forth. He directed plays, he directed films, wrote, directed. And when he wrote for T.V. too, he wrote some long form scenes for a marriage and so forth, that was actually Swedish television.
57:01 But his films, his attack on every scene is how could I do this in a purely visual way and dialogue is the regretful second choice. And so when you’ve been an actor in films, you know how much you can do with how little. And so when you write, if you’ve acted, when you write, you don’t stuff unactable talk into characters’ mouths because you know this is, you know. So acting is a great preparation to be a writer. So those are the people that are there, they all have a mission.
57:37 Brian Rose: Now traditionally when you think of creative people, writers, you think of people that kind of have to have their feelings looked after and kind of nurtured along.
57:49 And yet you seem to be the very stark difference to that. Of course it’s amplified in the adaptation sequence. But do you think that’s why you’re popular, to be really straight and tell them, no, you need to have some type of structure? Do you think that gets some results faster?
58:10 Robert McKee: Well I do talk with a sense of imperatives. And they, I guess, people, I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, people get the feeling that it’s the truth what I say. One of my missions in these lectures is to drive dilettantes out the door. There’s a certain kind of person who will teach a subject like this and pretend anybody can do it. Anybody can do it all you have to do is a formula and that’s just bullshit. Hardly one person in a hundred can do it, truth be told.
58:46 And I make that really clear to them that you’re in over your heads. You’ve got no idea how difficult this is and if you love the art in yourself you will survive. But if you’re here because you’re a tourist and who wants to be in the art, please don’t. Gerda said this, he said this is the theater but I wish it were true film as well. He said I wish the theater were as narrow as a tightrope walker’s wire so that incompetence would not dare step on it. And I think everybody who works in the business, professional, wishes it were as narrow as it so that the incompetence around them would just give up. And so I do the opposite of what most people do. I make them understand how really difficult this is. I mean your job as a writer is to make sense out of life, comic or tragic, and anything in between, but you have to make sense out of life. You understand what that means?
59:55 Making sense out of life. And this is why most people can’t do it. Because they can’t make that sense out of life, let alone make sense out of life and then express it in writing. And so I think the reason that people are there is because they know they’re going to be spoken to honestly and they’re there to make a decision about themselves and their futures. And these three days, it’s very concentrated. And so that in those three days they can realize I’m in for the ride or I’m getting off this train.
1:00:34 Brian Rose: You said in an interview I think fairly recently that times today are so much crazier and difficult to live in because of the uncertainty. And you said something like hundreds of years ago all we had was the plague to worry about. What did you mean by that and how does that affect writing?
1:00:56 Robert McKee: Because in the past values were clear.
1:00:59 Justice, injustice was clear. Didn’t mean justice would prevail, but we knew what it was. Right from wrong. What’s worth living for versus what’s foolish to pursue. For the easy example is love-hate. There was a time when all of society everywhere thought they knew what love is. And we wrote great love stories accordingly.
1:01:25 Today, does anybody know what the hell this is anymore? Believe in it? Is anybody willing to sacrifice what they need for another human being’s best interests? Would you give up your career for someone? I mean seriously. And so what’s happened, and this is true about every critical value in life, is I mean it went through a time when they were rather rigid, these values, then they got more flexible and relativistic and now they’re just totally confused.
1:02:08 Nonetheless, the writer’s job is to make sense out of life. And so in an age of confusion like ours, somebody has to tell a story, dig down, make sense, whatever quality, tonality. And if you do it beautifully, you enrich everyone’s life. I mean if nothing else, write a comedy so that we laugh at something we never thought funny before. That is a wonderful enrichment. I mean every time, somebody gives me a great one line or some joke or something that I never thought was funny before. My life has just been made better, not much, but it’s better than it was a moment ago because I never knew that was funny.
1:03:02 And so whatever you’re capable of, but there isn’t much meaning in life, period, or it changes all the time. But there’s one thing that is consistent, and that is that human beings suffer. And the fact that they suffer is really meaningful. Anything another human being can do to alleviate the suffering of someone or someones like the droughts and East Africa, whatever, anybody who can do something that makes life a little less painful for another human being, that is a meaningful action. Telling stories beautifully is meaningful because it makes life a little less painful. It makes life just a little more livable. And so without writers, without story, the chaos would overwhelm us. And so people who want to write, I’m their champion and I would do my best to help them understand what they’re up to because I know that without them, life would be unlivable.
1:04:19 Brian Rose: How do you keep such a pace? You’re teaching six of these this weekend worldwide. You’re in your 70s. Is it because you’re optimistic?
1:04:29 Robert McKee: Somebody asked me that the other day. They said, why do you keep doing this? Because I go from London, I’m going to go to Berlin, then I’m going to Shanghai in the next three weeks. Why do you keep doing this? And my answer was, this is a bit specious, but my answer was, I will keep doing this as long as I get laughs
1:04:53 Because it’s very funny this weekend. You’ll see. It doesn’t sound funny because it’s like, be there at 9am sharp. If you’re not in, you won’t be admitted to death. I don’t want slackers abusing those people who are serious. But nonetheless, it’s very funny for three days.
1:05:13 You laugh a lot. And when people laugh, it tells me they get it because laughter is involuntary. And it comes from the collision of two ideas in your brain that don’t necessarily belong together. Two ideas have no relationship. Suddenly there’s a relationship and you explode laughter. It takes brains to laugh and laughter is a sign that they’re getting it. They’re understanding it.
1:05:45 They wouldn’t be laughing. They’d be sitting there going, I don’t get it. I don’t get it. So when they get it, they laugh, right? And so as long as people laugh, I’ll keep lecturing because that means they’re getting it. As long as they’re getting it, I could just do this.
1:06:03 I don’t know how it happened, but I can lecture from 9 in the morning to 8 at night, days on the round end. And my feet get tired, God knows. But I can do it, so why shouldn’t I? Right.
1:06:21 Brian Rose: And you had never planned this.
1:06:24 Robert McKee: I don’t know where this came from. I do know where this came from. It was a total accident, like most good things. I was a working writer in Hollywood and I was invited to put together a little workshop for writers at a place called Sherwood Oaks Experimental College. And I thought that was fun because writing is so, you’re alone all the time. So I thought we’ll go meet other writers and we’ll talk shop. It’ll be fun. And so I put together eight weeks, Saturday mornings, 9 to 12, 24 hours, eight sessions, and I kept getting invited back. And then I got a call from Women in Film in New York saying we would like you to come to New York to do what you do in L.A. And I said I can’t spend two months sitting around New York waiting for Saturdays.
1:07:19 Right. And this woman said, well, do you think you could do the whole thing over a weekend?
1:07:27 Is that possible? The talk? Eight hours, you know, 10, we had breaks, 11 or whatever. Is that possible? And I was an actor. And so I thought, I’ll see what I can do. So I showed up and I put it together, did it over a weekend. And the next thing I knew, the phone never stopped.
1:07:49 I was getting calls from Europe, from everywhere, wanting those three days. And it became the story seminar. So it was just there.
1:07:58 Brian Rose: Do you think in a world of political correctness and trigger warnings and safe areas that people yearn for someone like you?
1:08:06 Robert McKee: And I hope so because-
1:08:07 Brian Rose: Giving it to them straight.
1:08:09 Robert McKee: I hope so because that’s how I begin the lecture. I give them trigger warnings about language, about politics, about religion, about sex, about all those things my mother said you’re never supposed to talk about. And peaceiness. You know what I mean? The notion that no one should ever be made to feel bad about who they are. Well, you know, I’m there to report that there are tens of millions of people in this world who desperately need to feel bad about who they are. And it would be criminal not to help these people. It’s my mission. And so I talk straight and they- Yes. The answer is yes, they are grateful that somebody is not tiptoeing around all these. And I, for example, I noticed your mug here. It says journey. I do a whole thing about, do not use that word. Journey is a euphemism for the struggle of life. Life is not a journey.
1:09:22 Life is an uphill battle. It’s Sisyphus pushing that rock. It’s not a journey. And so I warn them, your writers, euphemisms are designed to separate you from reality. That’s their job. You do not use language that separates you from reality. And so all those euphemisms got to go. So I would suggest that you retitle your mugs.
1:09:47 Brian Rose: To what? What do you suggest? What’s it say?
1:09:51 Robert McKee: It’s about the fight, struggle. Struggle. Embrace that struggle because that’s what life is about.
1:09:58 That’s the word embrace is too sweet. Just be struggle. Exclamation mark.
1:10:04 Brian Rose: All right. Point taken. What’s your favorite swear word?
1:10:08 Robert McKee: Oh, the usual. The one that is so flexible, it becomes a syllable if you want to inject it. It’s an adjective. It’s an adverb. It’s whatever. It’s every part of speech. I’m admirable. It’s conjunction even. And it’s got all those nice plosives. It’s a great word.
1:10:34 Brian Rose: How close was Brian Cox’s portrayal of you? Did you guys talk before that? Because he threw some f-balls in there.
1:10:42 Robert McKee: He was a student of mine up in Glasgow. Okay. And we knew each other. That’s why I cast him. They had a whole list of British actors and they were all fine, you know, Michael Caine and all of the usual suspects. And Brian wasn’t on the list. I said, well there’s a name that’s not on this list. I want you to talk to him first. And Brian Cox, and they said, who’s that? He’s the best British actor you don’t know. And I knew Brian. And see, I knew actors, no matter who they are, it wouldn’t matter if it was Michael Caine or Terence Stamp or whoever it would be, okay, playing a hard ass like me, okay. They’ll do it because they’re actors. They’re really good.
1:11:31 But there’ll be this subtext of love me, love me. There’ll be this subtext of, but my heart’s really in the right place. Which is every actor’s mistake. Every actor’s mistake, right? And I knew that Brian would not do that.
1:11:45 Brian will not put that lovely subtext under that because I do not want to be loved. I want to be respected and I want to be listened to and I want to make a difference in people’s lives but I don’t need a bunch of followers hanging around. I mean, you know, my wife and I have a very happy life alone, thank you. And so I don’t want that. And I knew Brian would be great and that he would be honest and he wouldn’t spare feelings. And he was great.
1:12:30 My son and I went to a screen, the first cut at Sony. And I mean, I see myself being portrayed, okay, that’s one thing. But I played myself in a film before, a film called 20 Dates. And as an actor I’d seen recording, I mean I knew what I looked like. But imagine what it’s like for a son to watch an actor play his father. So when it was over I turned to Paul and I said, what’d you think? He said, he nailed you.
1:13:03 Brian Rose: And that’s probably the single most popular piece of media that you or your character has ever produced.
1:13:11 Robert McKee: Well now you see we’ve done The Simpsons and so there’s a rival performance. It’s true.
1:13:18 Brian Rose: We saw I mentioned that right next to a major Hollywood movie. I saw just a little bit of it. I saw you on the blackboard. You know you’ve made it when The Simpsons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you love and hate now when it comes to movies, long-form television these days? Who are the names that come up that I like what this person is doing, I don’t like where this is going.
1:13:48 Robert McKee: You know, I just don’t pay attention to names.
1:13:52 I saw Big Little Lies. Have you seen it? No. Seven part miniseries adaptation of a novel written for the screen, adapted by David E. Kelly, and it’s as good as anything.
1:14:12 Robert McKee: Did you see Louis C. K.’s internet series?
1:14:17 Brian Rose: Yes, yeah. What the… You love that.
1:14:21 Robert McKee: Louis C. K.’s a genius.
1:14:24 Brian Rose: So non-traditional. He’s the modern day of Geno Neo. Why did you love that so much?
1:14:35 Robert McKee: You know,
1:14:36 When you feel uncomfortable, when something is so true that you’re actually made uncomfortable by it, you know what that means? It means your brain is going through a learning experience. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable because this is stuff your brain would really prefer not to have to deal with. This truth is too much, right? And therefore it’s compelling. You can’t look away.
1:15:06 And when work is really that good, for me, is my personal reaction, that I feel a little uncomfortable because it’s just too true. You know, the most important truths we ever experience in life are the bitter ones. Watching those two brothers, knowing one of them is insane,
1:15:44 That there’s this whole family, there’s the family within the family which is all the people at the bar, right? It’s like family surrounding a family. And the truth of the matter is that family is the source of more suffering than any other institution. What people do to each other inside of families is just terrible, just the worst. And we are all, if we’ve gotten anywhere in life it’s because we survived the damage. And before I knew that, childhood is no golden age, it’s a nightmare, you just hope you get through it.
1:16:27 And so watching Horace and Pete, another show I love, Ray Donovan, they’re both about Irish families. And the Irish have a particular genius for hurting each other. And-
1:16:49 Brian Rose: You have some Irish in you.
1:16:52 Robert McKee: Yeah on both sides. And so when I see Ray Donovan or Horace and Pete, it just took me home.
1:17:04 And I know, because the things that I love the most are not uplifting, they’re revealing. And somebody asked me once about, well my preferred death would be with a book in my hand, so that there’s something going in when I’m going out. And that’s what great theater, great story, great writing like that, for me, while I’m watching something like Horace and Pete, all this incredible insight is going in. And I thought I’m ready, if I would kick over right now.
1:17:49 Brian Rose: Because you’re getting so much out of life.
1:17:53 Robert McKee: I’m getting more than I’m losing. So the fine writing like that is, for me, the highest form of human expressivity.
1:18:03 Brian Rose: It’s a part of me is surprised to see you get so excited about these new series and these new shows when you talk about them, you seem like a kid in a candy store.
1:18:17 Robert McKee: I am a kid in candy store. The candy store is getting bigger and bigger. I mean, there’s, you know, Better Call Saul. I mean, you can’t keep up with this. And Black Mirror, you watch Black Mirror? Oh my God. It’s incredible. It’s an anthology series. Different story every week, different cast. And who’s ever created this series is finding sources of horror coming out of technology and little discotopian futures of one kind or another that I never dreamed of because I’m not a tech geek, you know? But they are. And they see the implications in iPhones and all the rest of it, you know, and the surveillance and whatever nightmare it is. And so the work just is just wonderful. And to me, I was discouraged 20 years ago. Back in the late 90s, going into the 21st century, I thought it’s going to all, you know, it’s like it’s exhausting, writing is exhausted, we’ve been through all of the avant-garde, every kind of anti-play, anti-novel, anti-anti-anti, whatever. Jackson Pollock’s painted a black canvas and called it a painting. I mean, you know, music is so repetitious and exhaustive and I thought all the arts now have technically,
1:19:56 Formally exhausted themselves. And every kind of variation on form has been experimented with in storytelling. So where are we going to go in the arts and my most important story, where are we going to go? And along came these great series. I thought, you know, why did you worry? What these artists needed was a medium that would support them. I mean, just financially, I mean be supportive of their dark visions or the absurdities of their comedies, you know. And the future looks, you know, to me looks great. And so I hope that the quality of the storytelling in the world is getting better by far and that that will balance the scale of what’s happening politically. And in that somehow we’ll keep a balance. And that the writers, the journalists, and their storytellers too, will step in and save us.
1:21:21 Brian Rose: Can I ask you a couple questions about your own?
1:21:24 Robert McKee: We have to be careful because, oh, that guy’s, I have this, I have to be somewhere at 5.30.
1:21:29 Brian Rose: At 5.30, that’s right. I’ll wrap this up right now. I’m going to get you in a taxi. Sorry about that.
1:21:35 Robert McKee: No, that’s all right.
1:21:37 Brian Rose: I always ask my guests one question at the end. I’ll ask you as well, Robert. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Robert, wherever he is in the world this time, and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell the 20-year-old?
1:21:51 Robert McKee: Daisy was no good. And he didn’t know that, okay? And that was the biggest mistake of his life. But she was no good. And he should have seen it coming, but he didn’t because she was gorgeous and he was helpless. And in the face of that kind of beauty, she was no good and he should have seen it coming. Ex-girlfriends.
1:22:10 Robert McKee: And saved him, wife.
1:22:11 Brian Rose: Wife, okay. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received, screenwriting advice, acting advice, anything.
1:22:17 Robert McKee: Be yourself. Okay.
1:22:18 Brian Rose: And then finally, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us around the world somewhere who wants to be the next great screenwriter, the next great storyteller, what’s that one piece of advice you can give?
1:22:29 Robert McKee: Don’t quit. Don’t quit. It’s all about presuming talent. Don’t quit. Don’t get discouraged. And you’ll get discouraged. Don’t get by it. Get past it.
1:22:44 Just don’t quit.
1:22:45 Brian Rose: Okay. Robert, as you know in London Real, we used to say it’s about the journey. I’m going to change our tagline to it’s about the brutal, destroying struggle, right? Because that’s the euphemism. I’m just teasing you. You know that.
1:22:59 I saw you looking at that mug earlier. But look, it’s great to have you here. We were reading your book when it come to telling our story of London Real and our journey over the past five years talking to people. So I’ll be there this weekend with one of my staff. Great. And we can’t wait.
1:23:14 Like I said, got Castle Blanket downloaded. I’m watching Kramer versus Kramer. I’m watching Chinatown like I’ve never seen Chinatown before with all the beats and things you’re showing me. And I’m learning about story and how it needs to arc and all these different things. I can’t wait to read character when it comes out. Storynomics, which is coming sooner. I’m going to get the audible version of dialogue and check that out. But thanks so much for your time. And I wish you all the best.
1:23:43 Robert McKee: My pleasure.
