All language subtitles for 105 - Story Inspiration Case Studies

you gotta feel that that

that flush of

of inspiration around an idea

and sometimes it's the themes

sometimes it's the freshness of the

of the presentation combined with some traditional

familiar themes

splash is an example of basically a 30s romantic comedy

it makes all the boy meet girl

boy loses girl

boy gets girl back

you know all the obstacles

you know they're

they're right out of the screwball comedies

which I always adored

but you you know

even there in the 80s

when we made splash

it was already too tired to do it in a literal way

yet adding the

the you know

the fantasy element of her being a mermaid

it it made all of that okay

so it was sort of

the traditional idea

the sort of

the sort of quaint idea was suddenly fresh visual

funnier and

and more interesting a long way

I also came up with this other theme

that love is not perfect

and I I actually got

um you know

a John Candy character to say that line

and it became you know

really important to me that it was the idea that

you know you're gonna have that initial

um rush of romance and excitement

and then you may discover there's some complications

there's some problems

there's some

you know and

and yeah what are you gonna do with that love

is that gonna be the thing that chases you away

or are you gonna accept it

um and um so uh

that became a secondary theme

that I became very passionate about

with Cinderella Man

there were a number of things that I liked about it

it wasn't really the boxing

even though I love sports

um and my dad had memories of

of Cinderella Man

James Braddock

and what he meant during the depression you know

as a kind of a hero

but I was most interested

in finding a way to convey to modern audiences

what the abject poverty

of the depression meant on the population

I thought it was particularly interesting that

this story was about that kind of poverty

poverty then you now mostly see in urban areas

generally people of color

and then here was a story about

you know um

an Irish you know

Caucasian all American family

that was going through that kind of suffering

winding up in a kind of a ghetto

and struggling to get out of it so I

I'd always wanted to do something about the depression

um an era that shaped my parents lives

I'd always been fascinated by it

in high school

I made a documentary um

about the depression

instead of doing a written school project

I got to make a movie

and got an a

too you know

that's why I was involved in it

and yet the real center of it was this amazing

true story of

of James Braddock

and it carried a narrative that you couldn't ignore

but I was always a little bit concerned

that it was sort of a familiar narrative

you know was it too familiar

well I did my research

I put together

um reels of boxing scenes

going back to Wallace Bury as the champ in

like 1930 31

um of course

Raging Bull

but also jimbratics footage and

um and you know and

and and everything that we could find and

um began analyzing how we were gonna shoot it

and so forth

and then I came across

on the real

a Popeye cartoon

the Popeye cartoon was about boxing

well I thought this was kind of funny

I always loved Popeye I watch it

it's our storyline

Popeye is down and out he wants to challenge Brutus

Brutus is the champ

Brutus claims he's gonna kill him

olive oil is beside ourselves

please don't fight Popeye

Popeye comes back

eat some spinach

and lo and behold

carries the day

I thought it's our whole

it's our whole plot

when was this

when was this cartoon made

it was made like

the same year James Braddock fought

it was either about Jim Braddock or

you know or that boxing arc was already a cliche

they were already making satires

out of this plotline

uh so that definitely threw me and it worried me

but it reminded me both

to make the boxing as visceral and intense as possible

it encouraged me

to make each fight be about Jim Braddock

his state of mind

where he was in his quest to feed his family

and it made me work even harder through the research

to make sure that the depression era elements

of the story really did resonate with audiences

and we did elevate beyond being

you know a boxing story with a basic plotline

cocoon was a project

um the first time in my career

I came across a screenplay that had a green light

they wanted to make the movie

they just needed a director

I inherited a screenplay

that I thought was very promising as an idea

but didn't deliver fully on a humanistic level and um

I was very attracted to something my wife had told me

she my wife Cheryl

has a degree in psychology

she spent a lot of time focusing on geriatrics

and worked in senior

senior citizen homes

and one of the things that she said to me was

you know what you could say with this script

something I observed

and that is that we never really get out of high school

we never really lose those simple

petty basic feelings

I thought that as they get younger

that some of those

some of those problems might reemerge

and they might

you might be able to relate to them even better

as they go through their sort of

fountain of youth moment

that became a central theme that I thought was fresher

more entertaining

more surprising

and could connect audiences

um with you know

with these senior citizens in a in a

in a more revealing and relatable way

Apollo 13 was a true story

that I didn't know very much about

and I had no notion really

of how complicated

um the the the

the rescue and survival story was

and I became um

really challenged and inspired

by the truth of the story

and the cinematic possibilities

of really taking the audience on an Apollo mission

really letting the audience understand what it was like

to be there

I love movies that transport you in that way

and I took a very journalistic approach to it and

and my motto was

just show it

so I wanted to take people on that experience

that was a little bit less thematic

and a little bit more cinematic

in terms of you know

the elements that's excited me the most

as I went deeper and deeper into the project

I began to connect with the emotional thematics

on a much deeper level

and I think that identifying that

largely through the research um

was is is um is

is probably what gave the movie an extra dimension of

um of of impact and

and maybe surprised audiences in in ways I

I know it surprised me as it

as I kept sort of discovering it in this story

a Beautiful Mind

that screenplay was well

well down the road

was already excellent when I read it

it would existed at imagine

it was a project that Brian Grazer had had nursed along

and developed carefully

along with Karen Kehela and other people at Imagine

and a key of Goldsman script was already very strong

I was inspired by

both the emotional journey of the couple

even more than then John Nash

I thought it was a romantic story

I thought that it was a story of love triumphing

in some ways

and I also felt that it was brilliant

the way Akiva Goldsman forced the audience

to believe in those characters of the hallucinations

and then pull the rug out from under the audience

and therefore

um not only

not only is it a great twist

but it leaves you understanding how real

those hallucinations can be for somebody who is

you know living with schizophrenia

and I thought it was just a powerful

fresh and very informative

both intellectually and emotionally

and you know

that's a that was a powerful combination

that just knocked me out with a screenplay

rush was a very interesting journey for me

it was a spec script written by Peter Morgan

he had written Frost Nixon

I'd very much enjoyed directing that

and collaborating with Peter Morgan

um and Peter told me this story of these

these two rivals

and I was immediately taken by it

I had loved the Larry Bird Magic Johnson documentary

which was you know

about basketball rivals

I'm a basket

I'm an NBA fan

and I thought that was a

um terrific film directed

by Ezra Adelman and

and I immediately equated this

um with that

except it had this visceral component

of Formula 1 racing so I

I felt like that um it

it revealed a lot about pride

and the need to define yourself as a champion and

and the willingness to risk everything

and the cost of that journey

and I connected with it on that level

and it was immediately a movie that I wanted to see

and the screenplay was already very strong

but it just kept getting stronger

the more research we did

and the more Peter Morgan and I continue to discuss it

and um and it was a real thrill

that was a tremendous challenge

logistically

because um um

it was not a studio movie

uh and and and yet

we had to deliver on what I felt was a promise of

of um you know

speed and Formula 1 racing uh

which has been seen

you know and done very well in the past

but I needed to

borrow from what I Learned doing the fires in backdraft

and the boxing matches in Cinderella Man

and the interviews

between David Frost and Richard Nixon

were made a conscious decision to let each set piece

reflect the characters in a different way

psychologically

allow the audience to sort of feel it

sense it through the characters

in a way that was um

um viscerally

a little bit

a little bit specific

and with the races in rush

I wanted them to reflect

the psyche of either Niki Lauda or James Hunt

depending on which

of the two characters we were focusing on

because it was a true two hander

it wasn't about one character the other

it was about a couple

was about a rivalry

in the way that rivalry

you know influenced their lives for forever

push them to you know the heights that they realized