Full transcript: Stephen Brocklehurst on London Real
0:00 Good afternoon. Welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose. I’m here as usual with Mr. Nick Gabriel and today joining us in studio is Steve Brocklehurst.
0:25 Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming, Steve. Before we get into your craziness, I want to say that this is our first episode that’s sponsored by Alpha Brain. And for those that you don’t know about Alpha Brain, well, I don’t know. Nick, can you tell us about Alpha Brain?
0:40 Yeah, I can tell you a little bit, AlphaBrain is a cognitive enhancer, so basically it makes you smarter. It’s a bunch of vitamins and chemicals that are going to, actually chemicals are probably not the right word, but it’s a bunch of really good stuff that’s going to make you have crazy dreams. Lucid dreams. Lucid dreams. What is a lucid dream, by the way?
1:02 By the way, we’re all on it right now, which is funny because that’s the website. It’s on it.com, O-N-N-I-T dot com. And when you type in London Real as a customer code, you get 10% off, and they ship from the States. And yeah, we’re all on the Alpha right now. Steve just got on it.
1:18 But it’s basically just to help you think a bit clearly. It’s probably for some people, not for other people. But what’s the big ingredient in it? It’s a G? GPC coline.
1:27 OK. So if anyone’s seen the movie Limitless, it was probably based on something similar to Alpha Brain. Except Alpha Brain doesn’t kill you, right? Yeah, and now we’re gonna get sued. When it doesn’t make you instantly rich.
1:44 Well, who knows? So Steve, it’s really good to have you on the show. Nice to be here. Thanks for coming in. Man, I would try to introduce you, but I just don’t know how.
1:52 I mean, if people ask me who Steve is, I would be like, okay, well, he’s an actor. He’s a former singer slash rapper. I think you told me a long time ago that you used to jump out of planes. I was in the parachute regiment, yes. Okay, and then you’re also a former city boy broker, which is how I know you.
2:09 And I think now you’re producing and working on a film. I don’t know what’s going on with you. When people ask me what I do. What do you tell them? I tend to, it depends on who I’m talking to.
2:19 Obviously you cater the answer to the person, but I’m a represented actor, a represented director, a represented writer. And… What does represented mean? As in I have an agent representing or writing an agent that represents me for acting, because technically, if you don’t have that, then anyone can be an actor or a writer or whatever. Is that is that I’m a different agent for each craft? Yeah, I try to because they normally specialize in one field Okay, so I’ve got my theatrical and cinematic agent does film theater and TV. My righty agent represents me for Script writing or book writing my book next year, which will help me get published and my belief system and I direct as well. That’s just me. Okay Wow Wow.
3:03 So can I ask you a question because I don’t know Steve very well, I’ve just met you for the first time today and usually if I’m in a social setting and I meet someone new, I tend not to ask what do you do, I usually ask what’s the one thing you like most about yourself and I usually get that response. You’re sitting in the hot seat but you’re asking the question, what do I like most about myself? most about yourself? That’s a difficult question. The immediate answer to that would probably be, not in a work answer, it’d be that I’m my mother’s son. She’s the most impressive person I’ve ever met, but in the answer, in the context we’ve been talking about, I’m aware that I may not be the best at all the things that I do, but fighting and you’ll know this better than I will probably. Doing any kind of martial arts or ringing competition teaches you that the only way you can definitively always lose if you don’t jump in a ring and I’m always willing to jump in a ring whether I’d lose get kicked in win victorious you know someone turns around says can you write us a feature film scripts that you’ve never done before or can you write a belief system you’ve never done it before can you play a psychotic Slovakian manic depressive Czechoslovakian suicide patients and I’m like cool you know I don’t have any idea how you start to attack it but you just have to start to attack it I didn’t know anything about broking or the city or finance any of it and but had to learn what this landed
4:36 Up knowing which was not much by the way I think you did pretty good with everything I’ve done I just kind of I think there’s a lot of gambling involved in just living and I’m always willing to throw my cards on the table it It doesn’t always work out too well for me, but I’d rather jump in than be one of the people to sit and watch. Man, I really respect and admire that. That’s a great answer. One of the best I’ve ever heard actually. Appreciate it.
5:03 So what’s been all that jumping in that’s going on? What’s been the big success and what’s been the flat-out failure? The flat-out failure would have been… The good thing about your life is they’re probably all on film. Well, yeah, I think it’s, my, my flat out failure was, um, the first feature film I ever did that I had a lead in was the one playing a Czechoslovakian man’s depressive. I had to lose like a stone in a month and doing loads of stuff that you think from an actor’s point of view, this is going somewhere. You know, it’s about assisted suicide. Um, it’s a film about euthanasia that was really current at the time. What was the, um, uh, Dignitas clinic? Is it Dignitas clinic in Switzerland? Oh, in Switzerland. Oh, were they doing, Were they killing people at the time?
5:46 Yeah, it was in the paper at the time, a lot, you know, and I thought this film could really, really do something. It’s called Mornington. I still have a copy of it, and I like it, you know, but it didn’t do any of the things that I hoped it was going to do, which is a real shame. And when you’ve been fighting to get your first lead role in a film and you get it, you don’t even think nothing’s going to happen with this. You think, yeah, I’m in.
6:05 I’m done with. This is in the cinema. And then you’re looking and going, it’s not even been at a film festival like what has happened. So that’s… Is it just so out of your control once it’s in the can?
6:14 Yeah, because unless you unless you’re a producer or a director or writer on it or you have something to do with the back end Which I didn’t then you kind of come in do your job and then it’s all the big family and you’re there for like two weeks and you see each other every day and you know everything about everyone and It stops and you’re like hold on what and they bring you in to have a look at the edit and go What do you think and you’re like? It’s kind of hard to say these guys been editing or doing something or sound or music for X amount of time and then go that’s not gonna happen. You kind of can’t because you’re just the actor. Do they even ask you what you think? Yeah they bring you in and normally it’s just one massive you know highly kissing session of oh it’s amazing this is gonna be the new you know Mission Impossible 5. No it’s not like you know I mean so you kind of get if you’re direct and blunt with people you get a bit they don’t always react the best in my experience so that was the failure that took me a while to. But Steve you know like maybe you can tell me in your experience of in the fight game there’s a there’s an expression which is you learn a lot more from your your losses than you learn from your victories and it lit like a fire in my stomach that’s always been there but it blew it from a fire to bonfire proportions like I’m never ever letting this happen again yeah right through my through my last relationship so I sat
7:36 Down to begin of last year actually and was like right well one of the things that I want to do with my life. I literally sat down my diary, which is the size of a house, and put a list of my New Year’s resolutions. And I was like, I want one year, just one year, to go exactly the way I want it to go. And I wrote down different categories of resolutions, so work, film-related, work, music-related, work, writing-related, social life, friends, women, family, financial, every different category, and then 10 in each bracket.
8:05 I think I had like 110 resolutions or something ridiculous, which is a year ago. This was last year. Okay, when did the movie come out? Yeah, that came out that was the year before okay, we’d gone through the whole year and it just hadn’t Nothing had happened with it. Nothing had materialized But I’d got like to musical nominations and I thought that was the big thing of my year last year Like it’s one of the things that made me feel I could keep going So I wrote a ton of things down. I wanted to write and a novel. I wanted to write a one-year biography, I wanted, since I left the city, I wanted to write my own belief system down, which I’ve never ever done. Can you tell me more about that? I find that very interesting when you said you spoke about writing up your own belief system. Is that your world view? I’ve never fit into a category of Christian, Buddhist, Islamic. I’ve never really been in that category. I was born, I suppose, by family, Protestant, Christian, not practicing just that’s what we were and a friend of mine who was a degree level physicist started to teach me on a vacation about quantum mechanics which I heard nothing about and then started watching movies like what the bleep and the secret and a lot of a lot of lectures if you haven’t seen you should see them by a physicist called Nassim Haramein I’ve heard of this guy he’s him staggering his YouTube stuff the podcast you told me it’s the YouTube
9:30 YouTube okay that’s called a you cast yeah I’ve heard of him yeah I think I watched a couple of his videos then mine but yeah the first few you’re a bit like this a bit slow and he gets a number four or five by number four or five or six you’re you’re gone you don’t want to do anything else the rest of you you know what guys that I’m starting to understand is just how little I know about anything it’s there’s um I think my previous guest he said there’s a saying in Iran, in Persian, which is, he who knows that he doesn’t know, has a chance. The guy who’s admitted, okay, I don’t know anything, and I’m happily at that state, no, I don’t know shit. It’s nice, it’s rare for people to admit they don’t know things, but we know when you get a new mind in the room, it’s amazing all of a sudden, we’re like, oh, okay.
10:22 You know, Nick’s got all sorts of crazy things that he knew about and I know about and we spent time together but all of a sudden we’re like, what? We didn’t know this. That’s cool. But the underlying theory seemed to be the most interesting thing from my point of view was that there are two beliefs in physics that I like a lot. One is that we know less than 0.000 is a recurring 1% about anything. And if you start from that standpoint, however intimidating it might be, at least it’s honest, you know, we know next to nothing.
10:47 So the tiny bits we are finding out, at least they’re scientifically tested. So I can rely upon that more than I can rely upon something I find in a book written likely thousands and thousands of years ago, i.e. I know if I drop that bottle on the floor, it will hit the floor because of forces we can calculate, work out, and test a million times. And I was like, well, what else do they know that’s more significant than that to me? Like, because I still want to know all the big answers to the questions, I’m probably never going to know them, but I’d at least like to at least get closer to them.
11:17 A lot of fun like looking at the mysteries of life do the stuff they actually know they’re testing now I was crying when I was watching some of these videos and when prom was telling me like this is actually true and I was like dude that can’t be true everybody would be told tomorrow he’s like why would they be told tomorrow this is science-based things the quantum mechanics of things like the double slit experiment or the power of the observer to change entanglements just I mean these kind of things are relevant to every human being in the world, you know, the fact that we’re 99.99% space. That doesn’t feel like that to me. We think we like these dense physical beings, but we’re not, as you said, 99% space, it’s incredible. And space apparently is energy. It goes against everything that my head has ever learned about anything, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It just means that I have been wrong for a very long time. I mean, I think wrong is probably too strong of a word to use, I think your perspective has just changed. And there’s one of my favorite teachers, David D’Angelo, he always says, he has this expression which is, everyone’s perspective is different and everyone’s perspective is always changing. And it’s true, you wake up every day a different person looking at things differently.
12:29 You change your entire physical body every six years, no matter the skin you shed and Every cell gets replaced, right? Yeah, I mean, that’s a fairly powerful notion. I’m literally not who I was six years ago, you know what I mean? Physically. So he taught me all this and I started researching it.
12:44 Even when I was in the city, it was just one of these things I’d go home at night and start getting kind of addicted to. And I started writing on the subject. And then I got into, I think we talked about at work, I got into and started celebrating because I just got into the Mensa membership. I remember. The editor of the magazine said, will you write us a few articles on this for a Canadian magazine, a Canadian magazine that they’re kind of similar to, called Synergy.
13:07 So I started writing predominantly on what I called Unity, but not Unity, U-N-I-T-Y, Unity Y-O-U-N-I-T-Y, so U-N-I-T-Y. I get it. Because it seemed more and more to me that everything was connected. So I started writing this thing called Selfism, which is just about the grand universal self and the me-self being a part of that self and it being like how the two connect or battle. Hey Brian, you were right.
13:35 This is an interesting cat, bro. I’m glad we didn’t spill all this in the kitchen and we saved it for the podcast. Yeah, it’s something very, very interesting in what you just mentioned, because I’ve always gone about meditation. Brian and I, we’ve gone quite far down that road, and we haven’t gone far. We’ve just scratched the surface, I guess.
13:54 We’ve started meditating for the past couple of years. And something that I try to explain to people, but you cannot impart the experience to someone who hasn’t gone through it themselves, is every now and then I’ll find there’s this moment where I just feel connected to everything. You’ll be walking down the street. The other day I was sitting on a train, and this is the last example I remember, and this guy was sitting across from me. This couldn’t have been more different.
14:26 I think he was like from from Asia or I’m not even sure where he was like 50 years old and I Could see he was thinking about something was in his own mind and I started making a judgment on him I was like this guy’s you know, whatever whatever the judgment was and then I realized this This thought came to me and that is that he is me and I am him 100% and this train is us and this every breathing is all the same. I believe that and I’ve just had this connection to the universe and then when you try to grab it when you’re trying to enjoy it more, it just vanishes. And very interesting that you brought that up today, thanks for that.
15:02 Well, there’s a phenomenon in the UK and around the world called the dark sky. Have you guys heard of this? No. Dark sky is like an area you can go to where they’ve located it in a country that minimizes the light and the sound pollution, because from the moment I started writing this, I’ve got like 130,000 words or something. Anyway, from the moment I started getting into it, my mind started changing, I think.
15:26 I became fascinated with looking at the sky at night and there’s a certain place you can go to that just there’s no light pollution you can see this entire thing so different isn’t I mean Nick’s from Africa and I the first time I saw this guy was when I was in Botswana on safari I was like that’s the sky there’s like 40 000 stars you don’t see the stars in London man you don’t need any stars yeah is it light pollution in the weather or I don’t know what it is but there’s certain places even in this country actually you can go to um that are not as good as places like I’m sure Botswana or Dubai or well the UAE is famous for having some of the best in the world but if you accept the notion or if you even accept the theory that at the moment of the Big Bang everything was compressed into something smaller than like if you can even fit in my hand it was the size of a pinhead apparently that means that everything was one already was one thing so everything that you can see in that night sky somehow is linked to me and to you and it’s just a I saw that and then was like Okay, I’ve got to get this published except I’m funny difficult to find a publisher who understands what I want to do with it Because they always talk to you about being the author of your work Because that’s how they get paid commission on putting out there What does that mean being the author of your work if you’re the author of your work, then you’re the person who wrote it
16:38 So if we came up with say ideas around this table But if I’m the person who’s writing them down the writer is the person who claims or thought authorship in terms of actually having written it Now that’s a dangerous term because I didn’t want all the belief systems in the world currently have one thing in common that I’m not a big fan of, and you mentioned it a minute ago, they’re static. You can’t change them. They’re books that are either taken literally or not literally, but they can’t be changed. The very idea of changing some of the holiest books in the world is sacrilegious and we can kick off riots. And I was like, well, most religions are based on being static, right? Being static, right? The only change in this. And I’m like, surely it’s human. Christianity, yeah, it all happened, right? It’s gone. You know, wise men live before us. We’re all ignorant. And I’m like, surely a human belief system would have to change, wouldn’t it?
17:25 So, I was in Greece this weekend, this past weekend, and I was chatting to my hosts about the ancient Greek philosophers, and amazing that you’re speaking about this now, because they put me on to a pre-Socratic philosopher called Heraclitus, and his famous quote is that nothing remains still or everything flows nothing remains still and it’s true everything is changed human beings something that I became aware of a long time ago is that a human being is not a snapshot you know I’m not Nick boom like having made up these ideas of who I am that’s completely incorrect what I am is a process everyone’s a process we’re changing all the time yeah and that’s That’s very, very cool, very cool, you mentioned that. Well I wanted to, if you called a publisher, a literary agent, and say the first thing you want to do is relinquish authorship, they’re a bit like, well how are we going to get commissioned?
18:23 Like we can’t give everybody authorship and I was like, no, I think the only way to do it properly is to have people contribute because I’m not in any way claiming to put quantum mechanics into a belief system, I’d want a hundred people, like we’re doing right now, to sit and think, well how is this done, is this accurate? Like a Wikipedia version. Kind of, because the sum of human knowledge is outside this window, the sum of Steve knowledge is inside this body.
18:47 I know which of the two I’d run with if I had a choice, I’d go with them every time. Why do you even want to publish a man? You could self-publish on the internet electronically in a heartbeat. Well, that’s the conclusion that my other literary agent has led me to, he was like, look, there are some works that you’re going to want to actually publish. He was like, if I was you, I would just put this in the freest, most open place possible.
19:05 But I have to work out some kind of mechanic, which is the difficult part. He said if people are going to send ideas and not ask for certain things to be changed or to evolve and to submit new things, then you’re going to need an actual structure and a mechanical way of actually doing that. Why do you want to publish this? It’s one thing to think about it, and let’s be honest, you’re a performer. You create things, whether it’s music or in films, and so you’re a different kind of person that’s not a performer.
19:33 So is this part of you want to put this out there so it’s there, or do you want to take a snapshot of just have something that I don’t know why publish my mom was a teacher okay and we all remember these moments like you were talking about this guy telling you about a philosopher we all remember moments where we believe definitively we have become bigger we’ve learned things and we have become greater people and I teach now at drama school in Cambridge and that’s me thinking I want to give something back but all the greatest moments I’ve had have not come from within me on my own they’ve come from people giving me information and me then finding a way of becoming greater or bigger and when my friend told me these things about quantum mechanics the double slit experiment entanglement the fact that you could break the speed of light but not just these things what they meant what do they mean for people my mind I could feel it stretch it’s a cool feeling I was like well I want to give that feeling yeah because you start I started telling people all the time about what the bleep I started telling about zeitgeist and the secret and they would come back to me with other things have you seen the same our main have you seen that and I thought do I or do I not ultimately really believe in karma now that’s it I’m very very interested to know your answer well it’s a tricky area for me because a lot of things in life have shown me that there are a whole
20:56 Different subset of rules that may not seem to indicate that but I think I’m I’m a real big believer in karma. If you understand karma to be what you put in, in some way, shape, or form, you get out. And I thought, you know what? One of the things I would love to be able to give to my friends, my family, my kids one day, is not the great answers to everything, because that’s not who I am. So it’d probably be changed by then, right?
21:23 Yeah, of course, it’d be 10 times different, you know? But I’d love to be able to give them the tools to work their own answers out. And I was like, that’s… as opposed to the Bible or the Qur’an, you wanna have some other options. Yeah, because it’s not like I couldn’t, I didn’t find any mental satisfaction in those things.
21:39 If you’re someone like you are, like you are that asks the relevant questions, and someone turns around and says, okay, I want you to suspend your powers of reason. I want you to just accept what I’m saying because I’m saying it. This is tantamount to mental suicide to me. I’m like, no, no, no, no, I need a, logic has to play a part of you. We still need to get your answer on karma because Nick and I have an ongoing debate about karma.
21:58 Okay, no what previous shows I know there’s different beliefs of common lucky that if you’re a good person I think good things will happen to you if you’re a bad person bad things will happen to you I know this message thing is good and bad. I absolutely don’t think there’s any such thing. I think that’s a false statement I think there’s only positive negative if you’re positive you’re a creator you’re constructive you’re creative You are an additive person you will your environment will prosper around you if you’re a negative person You will take from the environment and you will try and hoard and you’re a destructive kind of person Well, I will get to that in a few minutes.
22:31 I don’t know about that, but I do believe that… Neither one of those is better than the other, though. Like, the universe needs these polarized forces. I agree. According to the Buddha, there is no bad.
22:42 I mean, that’s an alleged universal law. It’s been my experience, that’s how it works. You need the tension from the opposites to create life or to create this force that we all experience, all this life force that we all experience. that entirely accept I don’t think that law in includes the notion of consciousness and I think that’s the only environment because the only law I’ve discovered not discovered the only law that I have heard of that applies to the entire universe is that they’re pretty much no laws because everything on a quantum level is breakable but even if you said there are no laws that’s a law so there’s that exact opposition you’re talking about but as soon as you have a human being that’s conscious and it can choose things for itself which which is again a whole different debate, free will and the rest of it, but assuming that is or is not what you believe, I think that in a conscious being, constructive brings more rewards than destructive. Yes, you can be rewarded for destructive behaviour, very much so, but I think the balance is put towards if you walk into a room and you leave every human being in there better off when you walk out, I think that has more benefit for the person doing it than if you walk in and kill everyone and walk out because there’s no benefit to that person he hasn’t gained anything there’s no I mean in the traditional karma sense it’s you put it out to get it later we were
24:03 Having this argument well I mean so my my idea of it is that karma is it’s a law that governs energy and so any energy that you put out well it’s like it’s like science right what’s what’s the the law any force is met by equal and opposing. Oh yeah, Newton’s Third Law. Yeah, so it’s the same with energy and it comes a lot to do with your intention. If I do something positive but with a negative intention, it’s not going to bring me a positive reward or it’s not going to bring me something positive, it’s going to bring me something back negative. It’s all about my intention. What are your thoughts on that? If you do something positive, as in like if you help someone out. So let’s say, yeah, let’s say I help someone out but I did it with a negative intention. If you help a chick out across the street where your intention is to sleep with her or something like that.
24:51 That’s a positive intention. That’s a fair point. So let me put it this way, I save a guy’s life because I know that in the future, this guy will help me gain power in some way. My intention was negative. I didn’t save his life.
25:10 That act of saving his life, which could be perceived as a positive act was not really positive act because the intention behind it was not positive. I think if you ask the guy whose life you saved, he’d say it’s still a positive act. But there’s a terrible example but you know what I’m saying. I think that the universe is very less judgmental about motive than we are. I think the universe is much more judgmental on action. Whereas we’re not so judgmental on action. Interesting. Because I’ve had, we all have thoughts that I’ve had thoughts, I have thoughts every day that if my parents knew about it would probably shame me infinitely. But it’s my actions that I’m judged on at the end of the day.
25:45 I have to live with my thoughts and my intention. I have to live with that. You know what, Steve, that’s a very cool perspective. Thank you for that. Yeah, that’s a very cool perspective.
25:54 That’s what the show is about. Yeah, just getting a nugget like that. Yeah, well, we can continue to come up with a debate later. I think in the past we’ve done it because I think in the traditional Buddha sense it’s like if you don’t do good in this life, in your next life, it’s a whole caste system. It’s because of their progressing.
26:08 But I always seem to think if you just put the positive energy out there without thinking that there’ll be a later payback, then that’s the way I try to live. But I think you’re kind of saying the same thing. Is it the same thing? Well, think about this. What you just said is illuminated something for me.
26:21 If you just put it out there without worrying about the future, right? That comes back to presence because the only reason you would do anything with that intention of focusing on getting something back in the future is if you’re not present because you’re worrying about something happening. You guys heard the parable of the two gardeners? No, but I got it now. This is the best example that someone’s given me about it.
26:44 We were arguing about karma and I was saying I thought it was a future thing. I thought you did something present, something future would happen. And he’s an annoying dude because every time you think you’ve thought of something really cool, he just ups his game by like 10 and then you just get… You want to get the student on the show? Yeah, we will.
26:59 And he was like, no, no, it’s all three. Karma is timeless. It’s infinite. And I was like, okay, give me an example. He says, right, there’s a gardener on the right hand side who is a very good gardener and he’s planted seeds and he’s watering his garden and there’s flowers and there’s plants and there’s fruits and it’s, you know, garden of Eden-esque, it’s beautiful. I’m like, fine, he’s like, there’s a gardener over here who just wants to dig his garden up, see if anyone’s buried any treasure, if there’s gold under there, so he’s, you know, he’s wrecked it, he’s put a barbecue out there and left litter everywhere and it’s just a dump. He said, the gardener in the positive garden is not only cultivating seeds for the future, because that is for the future, plant something so it will grow, he’s doing it in the present, because his present environment that he’s in is more beautiful so it makes him more cultured it smells better he can bring people over and they can feel more welcome so it’s better for guests and it’s better for him and if he looks back on the time he spent more things he’s learned he’s learned about nurturing things, culturing things, creating things and fostering a better environment there’s no negative to what this guy is doing whereas this guy you don’t want to go to his house or sit in his garden or have a barbecue because it’s disgusting and he’s a destructive person because he’s taken
28:04 Something that had present presently it could be right now beautiful like look at this garden and the future he’s destroying something because he’s taking away with every step a more beautiful future and he was like that’s why you do it for present and past and future and i was like that is one’s a gardener powerful powerful and perspective and i really appreciate that and be thinking about that you think about this um i’m guessing uh you would agree with the the statement that you are the garden. Both the garden and the garden. You have to, it’s an internal, external yin yang thing.
28:38 I’m both cultivating my environment and everything else. But that’s doing the same thing to me. So it becomes very important what I surround myself with and what effect I choose to have on them. They had, you’ve seen what the bleep, right? There’s a- No, I haven’t.
28:53 Have you not seen what the bleep? It’s a cool man. I’ll bring you a copy. There’s a whole segment on, I can’t remember his name, he’s a Japanese doctor who’s been investigating the effects of consciousness on water. It’s a motto. Yeah, and it’s, I had to, I nearly walked out. It was incredible, incredible doc. It’s staggering. Okay. I will. We John no actually watching it and I came out of cinema and I stood outside. I would there’s a tear coming down my face and his nose like you know what? I’m going back in and I walked straight back in to watch it again. He takes he he takes photographs of water, right? So if we took 100 glasses like that of water and separate them into groups of ten. So he takes a hundred glasses of water and he freezes them. Now water as we know from being kids grows into crystals and you look at it through the little thing and a kaleidoscope thing changes and it’s a pattern of crystals. He believed, he theorized that thought consciousness could affect the dynamic physical properties of matter. So he then tapes a thought to each batch of ten. So the first thought might be the Tower of love. That’s group A. Group B might be, I hate you and I’m going to do bad things to you. Take that to B and so on. Different thoughts across the whole lot. When you froze them and took it out, they were all different, except every batch of ten was the same. So everyone in batch A, the Tower of Love, resembled everything else in batch A. Everyone in batch
30:16 B, which was, you know, the hatred of chaos, for example, was all the same. Now, for My 30th birthday, John actually got me three prints. Truth was one, justice was one, and brotherhood I think was one of this investigation, pictures of these prints, because the notion is that consciousness physically affects and changes physical stuff, because physical stuff is just the manifestation of energy. Now- It’s a much denser, slower form of energy than thought. Right.
30:46 Yeah, so- So it’s the governing thing, that’s gardening. So if I think sat right here right now that my thought could actually affect you and you. And bear in mind that you’re both three parts water anyway. And that’s the subject. I’m immediately skeptical, but I have to be.
30:59 So again, you might find this interesting. So just what you said, we’re between six. I can give you an example, by the way, that will help your skepticism. Okay, I’m still skeptical. I have to be skeptical.
31:08 We’re between 75 and 80% water, right? So another one of the experiments Emoto did was he took a bottle of water and he had children, a group of school children say things to it. Like one of them, one of the groups said happy nice things or complimentary things towards the water. And then another group of children called it stupid and said a bunch of things. Then he took the water frozen and looked at the crystals and the one that had the negative thing, the crystal was malformed and it looked, it looked terrible.
31:34 Whereas the one that had nice things said it was this, it almost looked like a snowflake. It was a beautiful pattern. Which is a subjective call by a human by the way. Exactly. Whether it’s beautiful.
31:43 But think about this, right? If we’re 80% water, every thought that goes through your head is changing the vibratory structure. The whole time. The whole time. So he also did an experiment where, like you said, he labeled the water bottles, right?
31:57 So think about tattooing your body with a powerful word. 100%. That’s your self-imprint on yourself. And in terms of gardening, it’s like, I have to choose the effect I’m then going to have on other people and I have to choose the people I’m gonna surround myself with because they’re gonna have an effect on me. Now I was the same as you are, massively cynical about the idea, forget water, just of thought, having any effect.
32:21 And it’s not even really thought, it’s perception, is what it is. I believe that positive thinking and positive feelings can be infectious and can spread throughout the world. I mean, we’re doing it right now through the web and we’re going to affect some guy in Japan that’s going to watch this. I believe that, but affect things physically. But of course I’m trained in a Western scientific way.
32:39 I’m going to say, yeah, but that’s how, that’s my attitude to the whole thing. Anything that sounds faith about things, I’m like, you know what? No, no, no, no, give me a science of it. Sure. So I’ve tried to find anything online that refutes the results of something called the double slit experiment.
32:53 The double slit experiment mechanics. Yes, and they can’t, there isn’t anything thus far that can refute one particular result. Now, they weren’t doing the double slit experiment to look for this particular result. Can you give us a one minute breakdown in case no one’s heard of that? OK, the one minute breakdown is, let’s suppose that I have a paintball gun here, there’s a screen in the middle, and we’ve got the back wall, OK?
33:13 If I fire paintballs through one slit on the back wall, there’ll obviously be one line. If I make two slits and I fire paintballs through both, there’ll obviously be two lines. Now, when you take that down to an atomic level and you fire something through it like an electron, what they expected to see was fire electrons through it and you’d have two lines on the back wall. That’s not what happens. Because they were thinking it was a particle when it’s in fact a wave or both.
33:36 It’s a test particle wave theory. So they fire electrons through it and they get five lines on the back wall. That’s crazy. interference patterns because the waves come out like you’ve seen like two waves here that produce a big wave like water does if you put it through slides exactly like water through slides they see it on the back wall now because these are the smartest people in the world or some of they go you know we’ll cheat we’ll see which slit it goes through so they put a camera behind the screen as soon as they put a camera behind the screen and fire the electrons through again everything they get two lines on the back wall because it’s being observed because it’s being observed so actually instead of going through and interfering with itself in a wave of potential it picks one now you can find anything you want any way of interpreting that but the rock-bottom philosophical conclusion that the mind first jumps to I’m not saying it’s correct is that when we observe something we collapse the wave function of potential into a singular particle of experience now that’s nothing different really from me sending out whatever observances in my mind carrying certain information that we call thought or or opinion or whatever else, which is just information, and that having an observatory effect upon your water and your water and the rest here.
34:44 It’s an analogy, it’s not the same. No, it’s not the same, so it’s a good analogy. There’s certain theories that claim that there are multiple simultaneous dimensions, and what you’re doing with your mind is just collapsing that wave function into a specific dimension. And I can believe that because just think, let’s give a pretty practical real world example. So you have two twins, right?
35:07 Born on the same day, genetically identical. And you send one to a happy home that has a set of parents that instill upon him good virtues and good values and teach him how to think positively and give him a lot of hope and belief for his future. And you send another one to the complete opposite, a place that teaches him that the world is an evil, scary, dangerous thing, that there’s no hope or whatever. Now, you look, it’s highly likely, or it’s highly powerful that in 20 or 30 years time, these two people are going to be generating or have collapsed to completely different waveforms.
35:43 Absolutely. Yes. So, and again, there’s a whole bunch of arguments that we can get into about nature versus nurture and you could keep going down rabbit holes over and over again, but your thoughts in my opinion, from what I’ve seen, your thoughts create your reality. But then again, we could start talking about what’s above mind and what’s above thought, Which is what meditation takes you to, because when you switch the thought off, you connect to something even more powerful, it’s a meta-level, you connect to God or to the universe.
36:13 That’s a whole nother level. Yeah, that’s another level up. I want to, we probably do a four hour episode just on this, before we get too far away, I just want to know a couple things. First of all, I do want to know what you’re working on right now, and then I also want to know what your reflections were from the city. Because if you listen to this guy, he doesn’t really sound like a city guy, does he?
36:33 Yeah, not at all. I’m amazed. By the way, if anyone’s not in the UK, I’m referring to a city guy as a former Wall Streeter. So if you want to occupy a former Wall Streeter, you can go sit down in Stratford by where Steve lives. Yeah, exactly.
36:46 By the hot-ass. Because he was part of the machine. I was. Actually, talk about that first. I’ve been telling about the movie.
36:51 How long were you in the city for? I was in the city for two years. Okay. And when was that? What do you mean?
36:57 2011, 2010… Is it eight to ten? eight, eight and nine, 2008, 2009. And like, you know, for someone who’s not familiar with the city at all, say my viewers or Nick, what’s it like? You know, what did you get out of that experience?
37:12 I know this is going to be a really unpopular response, given the zeitgeist at the moment. But the first thing was I was massively impressed because these are, I was in the military myself and I have a certain love from martial arts and from the military of excellence in all its forms and discipline and hard work and industry and just being willing to do what other people are not willing to do. I find that an incredibly likeable characteristic and these people are up earlier in the morning than anybody else. I’ve ever met other soldiers.
37:42 They leave the office later at night than anybody else. I’ve ever met any of the business other nightclub promoters. They don’t leave their desk. I felt more guilty asking if I could go to the bathroom in the city than I have in my life. They have to work during the day and then take clients out during the evening. They, uh, have to take exams that have no bearing on their job at all, but they’re the most mind-numbingly brain-chewing, anti-alpha brain stuff. I wish I’d had that stuff back then. I could barely stay awake. It was that boring. Um, and I just found them very impressive and yet they’re, and these are guys that have more backing them or in a lot of their bank accounts than people will ever understand, but they’re normal. They’re down to earth dudes that have coffee and, you know, weird stuff for lunch and you laugh at each other and you joke. And that was all the positive stuff. The negative stuff was really more for me on a personal level. Like I just didn’t feel right. I got to a point like after I think a year, I’d have to check my daughter to know exactly when it was, but I think it was after about the first year that I’d always thought I’d done spoken word circuit, doing spoken word. I’d been in my studio recording my music. I’d I’ve been doing film.
38:49 I’ve always written, you know, and I got home one night and I had started regularly not liking what I saw in the mirror. And I’d got in because of a best friend of mine who’d helped me get into user places. And it was lovely working with him and meeting some of the most interesting people, you know, you could ever hope to meet anywhere. But it wasn’t the environment I’d have chosen to live in. The garden, I was cultivating for myself, became a garden with a desk in it and a phone and a computer, which is great, but I was there every day at the same desk.
39:23 Was it because it wasn’t creative? Is that what you were not seeing in the mirror? I didn’t feel like I was adding any value or that there were certain muscles in me that were not being exercised. Brian, would you say that you started to experience a similar thing? I can see what Steve, I think Steve has a, I think Steve saw what maybe it took me longer to see, you know, I mean, he probably saw it in a year what maybe took me longer.
39:46 It’s really interesting to hear you say that, by the way. And it’s easy for me to forget a lot of things that he said, you know, and there is some hardworking guys there and, and you take a lot of abuse in that job. I mean, from your clients and from your colleagues, you know, it’s tough. I mean, it reminds me of like a boy’s school when you’re 10 and boarding school and you just have to get beat up and there’s no, there’s no mommy there. But I don’t know, maybe this, I’m curious if you think this is a broken thing or a banking things. Steve and I were both and Broking, you know, which is kind of a service industry to the bankers. It’s very similar but it’s still different. I was just curious if you think that it might have been more creative in a banking or an investment banking place, or do you think in general that the city lacks that certain, of course, you know, you’re comparing it to creating music, you know? Sure, and that’s obviously an entirely different end of the spectrum, but I actually thought if I was ever going to have been, if I didn’t know what I wanted to do, there’s a concept in my belief system called like, you remember the word unity, but it’s Y-O-U, there’s one that we call the U-print, which is instead of a blueprint, it’s the U-print, it’s the blueprint of what you’re made up of at birth, you know. And you do have one, your genetic, your DNA, your double helix, all this kind of thing. If I didn’t know, and if I hadn’t
41:01 Known forever what I wanted to do, being to inspire people or to entertain people or to write and to perform or to sing or whatever it was that made people feel better, I could stayed in at the broking desk because I don’t think I could stay in a bank. I think that would have been too robotic sounds like such a negative work but like to clinical clinical maybe clinical maybe that’s the work but there wasn’t there’s not much from the people that I knew in banking and I know in banking now there’s not much of a human element whereas at least in broking at no point did I feel like a banker I wasn’t dealing with you know the breakdown of an instruments return on it if it was moved to Spain and the Spanish mall I was like huh that would just I’ll be dead after an hour it’s a lot of hustle and if I had to compare what broking is it’s hustling it’s hustle yeah you just hustle hustle hustle find out what people want to do try to get some business try to get some business it’s not much different than a guy in a corner selling drugs in my opinion you’re trying to find buyers and sellers you’re trying to put them together and if you’re not there then there’s no market it’s quite a princess man it’s quite Dragon’s Den and I think there could be such a great movie made about it because it’s the kind of place we’ve talked about it Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen boy you’ve seen boy The characters it’s not the same. It’s not the same and the characters are crazier. So dude
42:18 Bro, it was the most fun in terms of like if I could have done some other activity with those guys with the same crew Oh my god, dude I loved like having that much talent and these people who were from like 18 years old up to some people who are double that age or almost triple that age and having a still doing this hustling do you know okay do you think he wants to and it’s psychology and it’s a bunch of stuff that I really love but I would walk out of that on a Friday night everybody else would get to go home and I’d go to the gym for two hours and I’d go to the studio and I’d be recording a track that I was hoping would get me another music video or another award nomination I’ll be doing that for most of the weekend so when everybody else came in on Monday and like refreshed ready to go I’m like Jesus Christ I need like a day or something just to do did you find so that didn’t that didn’t refresh you getting that creative out or you know it is but you still there’s a different kind of tired you get like it’s there’s two kinds of tired we used to refer to in the military and one is like constant tired so if you’re constant tired and you’re doing things you enjoy you have it you have just a meter of tired and sometimes you feel good sometimes you feel bad but you’re always in that spectrum dead tired is when you’ve been overdoing it for like a month and you just you can’t you you literally get home and you collapse.
43:32 Even now doing what I do, I’m still pretty much always tired. And I remember that feeling for being in a city. I remember that feeling for the Paris region. But it’s a good, it’s like a good tide, right? Dude, I don’t trust myself.
43:41 I don’t feel that tide. You know what I mean? I’m not working hard to find out for that tide. I say to my friends, like when they, like, cause now I’m fucking tired as well. Where you can see in my eyes, I’m fucking tired.
43:50 But I’m tired for all the right reasons. You know, I’m pushing myself just to the point where I’m, it’s life’s exciting, you know? Anymore and I might be like, fuck, This is too much. Yeah. Yeah.
44:02 So I completely. And you’re having fun, right? Yeah. You know, it’s something that became so clear to me, guys, this girl, a friend of mine, big shout out to Angela. She said to me, I was chatting to her, I was on Facebook, writing a message to her and telling her what’s going on.
44:16 And she just said, are you having fun? And I had to stop and think about it. And I realized, man, this game we’re playing, this crazy human game that we’re all a part of. any other game what’s the primary reason why do you play a game you played for fun you know and even though from our very very finite perspectives as these little specs on this rock that’s floating through space some of these things might not appear fun like I’m sure it would be hard to make an argument that being in a war zone would be fun but maybe your soul that’s an incredible game for it to plate. There are some people that find that fun. There are some people that find that fun.
44:58 Exactly. Yeah, we’ve seen them.
45:02 You’ve seen them like platoon there, are those guys? I would also say, just to finish off the city question, that I’m incredibly grateful for my time there, because if I hadn’t been there, then I wouldn’t be here. Because you wouldn’t appreciate it, or you wouldn’t be pushing yourself? I don’t think you necessarily get to where you want to get by going the most direct route as as the crow flies, I’ve never ever seen that. Every sound bite I’ve ever seen, every music looks like that.
45:27 And it’s getting from there to there, but it’s doing that. And if you got from there to there and it didn’t move, you have no sound, it’s boring. That’s what’s interesting. It’s when you hear what I say to people who have this singular goal and that’s their sole focus in life and they wanna move from point A to point B in X number of years, I always just think to myself, let me know how that works out for you because that’s not how life works. That’s the question I always ask people.
45:49 If you could reduce everything you wanna do down to one sentence or one postcard, what would you, or one image, what would you reduce it to? We argued about that in my house for about five hours to come up with an image each, a sentence each. What’s your image? For your life. My image is, it’s the idea is what postcard would you send back from heaven if you got there and everything was the way you hoped to preserve.
46:07 That is fucking awesome, yeah, what would it just be? It took me like literally all my time at a company before and all my time at ICAP to find an image, but it’s called an Earthrise. It’s the first photos that were taken from the moon when Armstrong walked on it and you see, like the surface of the moon and then the distance, the earth just hanging there. And I was like, that’s the front cover for my album. That’s what I’d send back if I could send a postcard back.
46:27 You know, I have to comment on, um, you said thinking back on your time, um, the city, you’re, you’re very grateful. And I was speaking to Brian about it. Uh, I went and did a nutrition course with a guy called Charles Pelican, who’s, um, he’s a functional medicine doctor and also, uh, incredible high level, incredibly high level, um, physical training coach. And at the end of the course, he was just sharing with us some of his philosophies, and he was telling us about this thing he does every day, which is called the Gratitude Journal, which is writing down everything you’re thankful for in your life.
47:01 And, you know, I started to do that. I’ve been doing it for almost a year now, and it’s such a powerful exercise because you change the way you look at the world. You know, when you do it first thing in the morning before you leave your house, And then you walk around, your polarity is changed, you’re looking at the world and seeing everything that you have, not everything that you’re lacking. And the Bible says that those who can’t, their blessings are given more.
47:28 And when you change that polarity in yourself, karma, but present karma, right? Yeah. You’re still doing that every day? Every single day. I’ve tried it a few times.
47:37 I need to continue. Just like people that try meditation, you got to do it every day. Yeah, I’m going to have to get back on that. Try that. That was a really good perspective.
47:46 And Steve, you walked away from the city when I know you didn’t have to. And let’s be honest, I’m sure you took a pay cut, especially not knowing what your next project was. A pay cut, you probably went to pay a nut. But it’s, I mean, it’s hard, it’s any kind of, you know. I’m never gonna forget two moments of absolute despair in my life.
48:07 One of them was sat in my kitchen looking at a bag of pasta I had and it was the only thing I had to eat for like two weeks. And the second was walking out of iCap on a Friday, going home and thinking, oh my god, what have I just done? And that entire weekend, I ended up at a bar and a club and home and more drinks than I care to recount. It sounds like you learned your lesson. Dude, I really, but then the funny thing was, I woke up Monday, and I hadn’t actually done anything that weekend different, and I’d got my first lead role in the morning, too, and an email saying, you’re nominated for a musical award.
48:40 And I thought, well, I have to absolutely give this a go because there’s been a voice in the back of my head thinking I could call a couple of people. You could have. I could walk back in. You could have. It could have been difficult, you know.
48:50 You still could, if you make a phone call. I think so, it’s just I can’t. Man, don’t let go of who you are or your dreams for money. We’ve got stuff now. You wouldn’t now.
48:58 I know you wouldn’t. I’ve got, it’s taken me two years, which is so short a time in the span of a life and especially in the span of an actor or an artist. But we’ve got a couple of things now that I’m like, you have to build up the number of projects you have that have the chance to blow. And a couple last year, not so much. A couple of years before, had some potential.
49:16 We didn’t really do what they wanted to. Now I can feel, now I’m looking back and thinking, no, you’d have to offer me something ridiculous. Like, you probably couldn’t offer me enough. You couldn’t offer you, I don’t think, with what you’re working on now. So you got, I just know a little bit about it.
49:30 I think I watched the trailer of a film you’re working on that’s scheduled to come out next year. Is that right? Yeah, there’s a couple actually, but the one that everyone’s talking about, Yeah, it’s scheduled to come out Halloween next year. Okay, it’s a little scary, this one, right? Tell us more about it.
49:44 The Enfield Poltergeist is inspired by events that happened in a house in North London in Enfield in 1977, and again in, I can’t remember the year, the second time, but it affected two families. And it’s literally, if you Google it, it’s got like 83,000 search results, and it’s the most documented case of paranormal events in the history of the world. In the world, not just the UK. In the world. Okay, how did they document it in 77?
50:09 They had an investigatory team move in, they had police officers move to the house, they had journalists turn up at the house, there’s photographic evidence on the internet, there’s voice tapes of an entity who they’ve identified who allegedly possessed an 11 year old girl, spoke through the girl, you can hear the tapes of the voice. Do you like it already? Who cares if it’s true? No, I mean it gives it some nice credibility that it was documented. To put on any kind of anything for the film, It’s inspired by real events.
50:38 And it’s actually the most documented case of paranormal incidents in the history of the world, from a film point of view, is massively exciting. Have you been to the house? No. I’m aware of quantum mechanics and energy, and there are certain things that I do not want to. I’ll mess with most things, and I’ll get in the ring.
50:56 But I don’t choose deliberately to get in the ring with a T-Rex. That’s not mine. Did you see paranormal activity? I did, yes. What did you think of that movie?
51:03 You’ve seen paranormal activity? because it was shot for like $15,000 in San Diego. It took him like two years to finish. He had the actors doing the film work and then it didn’t go anywhere for a while, I think until Spielberg watched it. It got locked in his bathroom that day.
51:15 And that changed the ending, didn’t they? Or they had to do an ending? I think he did change the ending to it. Or they made a couple of endings, I think as well. Several, I think it was a couple of alternate ones.
51:22 And I had to watch that, given this film. So I’m not a horror movie aficionado by any, I believe in knowing one’s limitations. I’m not gonna tell you, I know everything about horror, I know nothing about horror, or next to- Which makes this interesting, I guess. Well, it makes it much more interesting I’m approaching it with a totally fresh look at it. I looked at paranormal activity I thought you know what that is a massive achievement. What did you think of it? Whether you like it or not I’m not sure whether I like it or not. I like I like the plan I can imagine someone sitting down just like we’re doing going okay Look, we want our first movie to blow big massively. How do we do it for 15 grand? Now? You have to have an idea that is so Intricately woven to do that and the best idea that or the best part of the idea I heard about it was Because they aired the film at whatever film festival it was, I want to say Cannes but it’s only because it’s my favourite film festival, I can’t remember which one it was.
52:08 There’s no way that went to Cannes. Well, I don’t think so. But they put it in the documentary part. Oh really? Yeah, so people walked in thinking, they were watching a documentary.
52:17 Now if you look at it through that mindset, instead of, I know this is a feature film, you would be scared out of your wits and they filmed the audience. So the trailer for the movie was not the trailer for the movie, the trailer for the movie was the audience reaction. Now that’s innovative, that’s creative. I read yesterday in an audition, what was it, on the wall? Artist’s job, when you break a pattern, a new world emerges.
52:42 It’s the breaking of patterns, it’s the doing of new things that excites people and that brings new stuff out. And I saw that and thought, yeah, we’re gonna have to do that. Smart. It’s any super successful businessman Like that takes over a field or takes over an industry. He does that.
53:02 He breaks the pattern. It has to be done. It has to be done. Facebook. Same thing.
53:07 YouTube. Same thing. All these things innovate. And one of the things that you have to deal with is people thinking you’re crazy. It’s like…
53:15 I get that every day. You know what I’m saying? Dude, absolutely. Because most people aren’t used to having these kind of conversations or doing these kind of things. to my family like are you really gonna work on a film where you know there’s something weird involved and I’m like well it depends on what you believe about something weird but if you’re in my business you look for buzz buzz as in buzz the energy that you in the right kind of room you in the right area it’s like hot and cold right you walk around a room you’re getting hotter you’re getting hotter you’re getting hotter and that’s buzz of a project and I’ve got a collection on my table at home of like nine different newspaper clippings we had slot on Sky News, we had three radio interviews on TalkSport, we’ve had two offers of a distribution deal, we’ve had directors that want to come on board and we’re not even like… Are you in pre-production or not really?
54:05 Technically we’re in, well you would call the phase that we’re in pre-production but it’s not actual proper pre-production, we’re still… They have a trailer out already and they’re in pre pre-production. We started actually working on this in Castley in March. I actually walked into a catechol room with like a hundred people for a casting. Let me guess they’re all chicks and bikinis right? Well you know for the Enfield Poltergeist. I wish it had been chicks and bikinis. It could have been the Enfield Poltergeist on the beach and then that would have been yes. How come this hasn’t been made before? That’s a question everybody has. There was a book brought out by one of the original investigators and then a documentary is done and the problem has been that these are real families involved you know Like the grandson of the entity concerned is a walking around living human being So if you wanted to make either the original story or the second story that actually happened You’d have to get a load of people’s permission and you’ve run a very serious risk of offending a lot of people Now that’s obviously not what you want to do There’s a lot of stories that have to wait till people die, right?
55:04 Even like the King’s speech they waited until the Queen mum died and then they would make it It’s exactly so that was this was about is it about right? It’s all about respect. No one could really come up, well, to the best of my knowledge, no one so far has found a way of constructing a story that can be called the Enfield Poltergeist, but that avoids the pain you caused the families, that avoids all different kinds of things. And we had to sit and workshop for months about how we’re gonna come up with this.
55:35 We had a scriptwriter on board initially to try out. One way, that didn’t work out too well. We’re now doing it our way. we’ve come up with what we think is the solution to tell the right story but without having you know someone offended or in tears or saying look this is involves my family you know da da da da are you producing it are you right now I’m writing the script okay I play one of the lead the highest credited male role okay and currently I’m doing the voiceover for when the entity takes possession of a young one so Steve let me ask you when what would you want if there was one thing someone could take away once they walked out of the cinema having watched this film what would you want that to be asking a question one thing they could take away yeah I would want them to take away with them a certain kind of feeling that I’ve had when I’ve watched a very limited number of movies. Usual Suspects was one. Fight Club is one. Six Cents is one. How do you characterize that feeling? I’m very interested to know. If I’m a different person at the end of watching a movie from the person I was when I walked in, that movie’s achieved precisely whatever they wanted it to achieve. I walked out of Fight Club thinking I have to A, buy it, B, see it again, D, or C, whatever it’s on, check if that was really Brad Pitt flashing up and did the twist really work the way it was supposed to. Usual Suspects I thought
57:07 Was one of the most magnificent pieces of artwork I’ve ever seen. To think that Kevin Spacey and the director shot that whole scene with a cop in the office in like two days. Is that what it was? Yeah, in like two or three days and he performed it in such a way and they wrote it in such a way, and this is the trick, that if you watch the movie a second time, it’s a different movie from watching it the first time. So true, huh?
57:32 Well, dude, the producers sat down with me on this, and they were like, look, we really love horror movies. And they know everything about horror movies. Jay and John are cracking, they just have this encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies that I don’t have, which is fantastic because I know nothing about it. I’m like, cool, so we’re in a horror movie. And one of the producers, John Kiriaka, goes, yeah, but you know what I really like?
57:50 I really like twist movies. And I’m like, twist movies like usual suspects in Fight Club because that’s one of my favorite genres. And he’s like, yeah. And he’s like, well, I think we should try and combine, we should have a horror movie, it’s a straight out horror movie, but it’s also a bit of a twist moving. It’s kind of like the sixth sense, right?
58:07 That’s the kind of thing that they’re talking about. And I was like, well, A, that sounds amazing. B, I can write that better because I’m much more familiar with that. But C, do you have any idea how hard it is to write a script that is definitively different the second time you watch it from the first time? I mean, that’s- I cannot imagine.
58:25 You have to control, like in quantum mechanics. You have to know the observer’s reaction the entire way through. I have to know what their energy level’s going to be at and you’ll have to know how it will be changed after the first viewing and how it will evolve on a second viewing so we’re like okay this is a different kind of task now this is because you could take a movie with the backing this has newspaper press radio press tv press and you could make a four out of ten movie and you could still have a good box office and you should do all that I’m so so glad they have the courage to not want to do that they’re like we want to make an amazing movie like we want people to leave the cinema be like okay so was it did it yeah but was it that and then arguing If people are walking out of the cinema doing that, no, I think it was this.
59:06 No, it was that. No, it was this. Okay, we have to say it again. We have to buy that DVD. So the second time they watch it, I want someone to do that thing in a movie.
59:12 Like, it’s almost difficult as an adult to describe it because it’s so much easier when kids have the reaction. When you’re sat in the cinema and you go, oh, man, dude, what? No, they didn’t. Like, that kind of thing. The last movie I watched like that, and I’m trying to get bright, I don’t think you’ve watched it yet, Inception.
59:28 Oh my God. I have watched Inception, yes. What did you think? I watched Inception. Well luckily I actually I did it on iTunes on my Apple TV so I actually had the benefit or maybe I shouldn’t have of pausing it because I was just like I just had a hard time. I was like what just happened? What just happened? What just happened? I’ve seen it a few times more and I guess it’s like you know it’s like a lot of movies maybe not the twist movies but it’s more I understand the subtleties a bit better. I wouldn’t say it’s a different movie each time but I just get it a little bit better. I still like it. I didn’t love it if you remember that Christopher Nolan both wrote and directed that movie to write and direct a movie with that many different layers I mean I was literally like bowing that’s my next question for you because you’re I mean you’re very concerned about the script but in a movie like you’re describing obviously the director or applying the script is gonna be just as important right because you have a great script and if it’s not shot I mean we’ve been arguing about the director for the last I don’t know how many months and talking about the essential of who we pick and so far we’ve had a guy that I know through a contact who’s directed some incredible stuff but I think before we can actually have someone definitively on board we need to have a sit down and be like look this is crafted in a very specific way like every time I’ve written a section
1:00:45 Of script we sit down we actually perform it out and we’re talking about I think you should direct it. Well, John was like, if we don’t get someone on board that you want, because the problem with the director is they’re expensive. You don’t get a good director for cheap, you know, it’s not how it works. And they’re trying to… What is that?
1:01:01 Hundreds of thousands of pounds? Dude, Brian, if you get like a $250 million budget, like Jack the Giant Killer, Brian Singer takes down, you know, 15 to 20, I mean, it’s as much as the lead. There’s that expression I’m finding, which is if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, right? I agree with that. on the other hand you have to know we need someone that understands it and knows it inside out. I know someone who’s directed an incredibly popular martial arts film called The Supremacy. I’ve heard about this actually. It was a film festival wasn’t it? And a famous actor actually commented upon it in a video didn’t he? Yeah it was James Bond. That’s the one with the bleeding eye to your thing yeah. You know the funny thing is you guys were both in the room on the premiere of my movie. I was there. But you guys didn’t meet. So you’ve been in each other’s presence before.
1:01:45 Ah, so our first meeting was actually at the premiere. I’m busy directing the podcast. I sensed the presence of a powerful force in the room, though, now I understand. But that must be so hard. I mean, on my small 20-minute film, which we’re talking about, but I got to write it, and I got to star in it, and then direct it.
1:02:02 But I mean, I can’t imagine writing something that you spent so much time as your baby, and then giving it over to a director, which you pretty much have to give creative control to the director. You can’t co-direct it, you can’t direct by committee, You can’t take all the guys working on it and say, because it’s not going to work, right? Even on a film set, it’s going to charge. You look at a director’s list of credits, and there’s two ways to go. One, have they directed a load of stuff that’s similar, like horror or twist movies or both?
1:02:29 Love to have that. That’s not the easiest thing to find, you know what I mean? That’s not a normal skill set. Especially within a specific budget as well. Dude, for sure.
1:02:36 Like, that’s the whole thing, because horror movies can be made quite cheaply and have a very big return at the box office. I’m not saying paranormal activity cheap because these are exceptions to the rule. Not everything is made 15 grand and that makes 250 million. But you can make something for a million and have it make 10 or 20. That’s done massive success at the box office.
1:02:55 The other way of going is picking a director who has done one or two things on their resume that have had massive success and other things that have done fairly well throughout. So we kind of have to have a shopping list of people that we’d like to talk to and then see who’s willing to come on board because in a lot of ways it would have been kind of easier if we’d just done your usual horror flick and the rest of it because then that’s pretty standard way of doing that. Please don’t do that.
1:03:22 The last thing I’m intending to do, that’s why we haven’t written it that way, but if you don’t write a standard horror flick and it’s a horror flick with a twist at the end, then we need someone who understands that you can’t just shoot that in a big collage at the end. From the very beginning, everything has to be woven into this tapestry so that the second time you watch it, we’ve covered your reaction the first time, watch it and your reaction a second time you watch it so yes it’s very difficult but I’m just having to it’s one of those things you just throw everything you’ve got the project so if they ask me to you know do paperwork or contracts or I find someone and get somewhere doing it because you have to do so much when you’re doing what I’m doing for free but you learn so much as well I do I can do things on a film set that like you never think you’ll ever have to do it you know if I ever have to hire someone for anything I’ll never like my first prerequisite will not be to look at the academic background it’ll be show me what you’ve done absolutely yeah yeah I just noticed like listen to Steve right now I mean like I it’s like he’s really doing what he loves you know and I mean like you should just you know we talked about being in the present all the time I mean like you won’t always be doing what you love you know in the past you’ve done it you’ve done things you didn’t love whether it was an I cap or
1:04:29 Something like that but like this is a great thing you know and you’re being creative and you know and like I don’t know Nick and I are kind of doing the same thing right now with this podcast and it’s it’s fucking awesome we’re just gonna get ding from iTunes now it’s gonna be explicit but like it’s a nice it’s a really nice place to be and I know I won’t always be there because you’re gonna climb the learning curve on a project sure but uh that’s a cool thing Steve man what a pleasure to meet you yeah seriously you know what I was thinking we should maybe have him back in three months time and see how the movies going and see how much he’s changed yeah or just talk about some other shit. Yeah, I’d love to. But we blew through that hour quick. Yeah. That’s crazy.
1:05:08 When you’re in good company, time flies. Yeah, when you’re present, time just loses its meaning. Very present. Dude, Steve, thanks for coming by. I know you never know what you’re getting into, right? And guys, when it comes out next year, make sure to watch the Enfield Poltergeist. And if anyone in the movie industry is watching this in England or anywhere else.
1:05:27 Do you, are you on Twitter or Facebook or anything? On Twitter we have, if you look on Facebook for, I think it’s the Enfield Poltergeist feature film, you’ll see a load of stuff on there, we’ve had like half an inch since March, we’ve got like, if you Google it, you’ll see 83,000 hits online, it’s getting a bit stupid, but hopefully it’ll get more stupid as we go along. It’s very strong, we’ll put a link to that on the London Real page. And we’re on Twitter, we’re on individually on Twitter right now, I’m on Brian B. Rose on Twitter.
1:05:53 And I’m on Nick underscore Gabriel, And it’s Nick with Just the Scene, okay? And we’re on iTunes. We’re getting a lot of audio downloads lately on iTunes. That’s getting really big. And obviously we’re on LondonReal.tv and then Facebook.
1:06:07 So leave us a comment, give us a rating, and we’re gonna just keep doing this. Also, yeah, if there’s any suggestions on people that you wanna see us have on the show or things you want us to talk about. Yeah, I got a suggestion from a chick the other day. She wants to see you without your shirt on, boy. I think I’m at that same girl.
1:06:24 I don’t know what to say. notes. I’ll leave it to you. Yeah, it’s about the journey, guys. See you next week. Take care, boys.
