Patrick Masset Pt. 2 - The Writing Process, How to Pitch, and Life and Death with Michael Mann | Ep 39 - The Actor’s Guide to the End of the World

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
You know, Michael, man, you know how

(00:01):
obsessive it is getting ready to leave in
a week to go on this research trip to
this very dangerous place.
And then I get a call from my agency.
You know what? There's a
there's a thing from the U.S.
council saying you
Americans shouldn't travel there.
There's a warning that they're killing
and kidnapping Americans.
You shouldn't go. So we
confront Michael about that.
And he's like, well, we'll
get some security guards.

(00:22):
Wait, guys, you get a higher.
So there's disease, there's infection,
there's malaria, there's like kidnapping
and there's assassination.
So research trip from movie.
Hey, guys, welcome to the Actors Guide to
the End of the World podcast, where we
talk about acting in
Hollywood in a way people understand.
I'm your host, E-Kan Soong.
And this is Rían Sheehy Kelly.

(00:42):
What's up, buddy? Hello.
So this is a another special installment.
We have Patrick Massett.
We weren't joking around.
If you didn't hear the episode a couple
of weeks ago, he talked about how he
scored early with adapting
Lara Croft Tomb Raider and just had, you
know, Friday Night Lights, the blacklist.

(01:03):
You can see all of his credits.
But this episode, we were very excited to
get a deeper dive into both of those
shows and also more
about his writing process.
We talk a little bit about mindset
routine, his his approach to life, his
kind of philosophy on how he lives and a
big change that happened to
him sort of nine years ago.

(01:24):
Yeah. We talk about sobriety.
Yeah, we talk about sobriety.
We get into the movie Gold, which is a
great story and it's a
really great episode.
We also recorded this over two parts.
I got a haircut in between.
Exactly. If you're watching on video,
Rian's hair did not magically change.
That was not A.I.
Rian just got a haircut.
We didn't stop for that reason.
We didn't stop just like that.

(01:44):
We were like, hey, we
got to stop this recording.
Rian needs a haircut.
Yeah, yeah, guys.
Anyway, this is a great episode.
Hope you enjoy it.
Follow us wherever you find your podcasts
at Actors Guide podcast.
We're on all social media.
Please enjoy this
episode with Patrick Messick.
So let's go back to can we kind of talk
about how Friday Night
Lights all came to be
besides the fact that it's a beloved hit?

(02:06):
If you look at the actors on this show,
Kyle Chandler, Connie
Britton, Taylor Kitch.
Also, a lot of people might
not know that was Jesse Plemons.
Yes, he was in high school or very young.
These actors were incredible.
Can you kind of talk about how just that
that project came to fruition?
Absolutely.
Well, Pete Berg had his I think his his

(02:29):
cousin or Buzz Bissinger wrote the book
Friday Night Lights, and it was about
Permian Texas football.
And it was seminal and it was amazing.
And then Pete goes out and makes the
movie, which I would
consider, even though I worked
on the TV show, still one of the great
sports movies because
it goes so deep into
character, so deep into

(02:49):
the acting is so great.
And it's so it's so much about, you know,
it's not about the game.
It's really about what it means to be a
young man growing up with expectations,
hanging on you so hard.
And it was really,
really beautifully executed.
And I think the big question when the TV.
So then from I'll just give you like from
my part, my business partner ran into,

(03:12):
you know, Jason Cadams at a coffee shop
and said that, you
know, my my partner played
football in high school.
In Nebraska, and Jason's like, OK, great.
And so we read that they sent us the
script and the and the
outlines that Berg had put
together and we read them and
said, this is fucking great.
We got hired next.
You know, we're you know, it was the
first TV show we'd ever been on.

(03:33):
We had done movies and we'd gotten a
couple of films produced
and and we had we were you
know, we had done we had
sold some pilots and stuff.
We'd been in the TV mix, but we had never
been on a staff before.
So the the the thing that we wanted to do
is how do we continue what Peter would
Pete Berg created?
You know, how do we how do we get the
acting to be similar?

(03:55):
How do we get the style to be similar?
How do we tell the story the same way?
Because we want to be it
wanted to be a continuation.
We don't want it to be
like that was one thing.
This is something else now.
A continuation of the film.
Yeah, a continuation of the film
stylistically and story wise in some way.
Get it to totally match.
Now, a lot of people, the reason I say
it, it's a lot of
people wouldn't do that.
There's a there's a
there's a connectivity to it.

(04:17):
Now, we so we met all the actors, you
know, the writing staff has assembled
and it's this amazing staff, you know,
Jason Kidd, Bridget Carpenter,
Liz Heldens, Kyrie Aaron, Dave Hudgens.
It's just incredible group of people.
My partner, John Zindman.
And and they bring the
actors in one by one to meet.
We meet them.
And it's really incredible because we

(04:37):
didn't know any of them.
We hadn't seen any of
them really do anything.
They were just all being cast already.
Like you didn't have any
say in the casting process.
Well, we had shot the pilot.
So the pilot was made.
And now it's like it was like it really
fit well with the movie.
And then now they bring on
now the show's picked up.
They bring everybody on.

(04:59):
And I was just we were all kind of amazed
at how wonderful and charming
and the casting was beautiful.
These guys are great.
And everybody was so excited.
They were just going to you know, and
Connie and Kyle were going to drive
in his Mustang to Texas together and they
were going to hang out.
And it was just really just camaraderie.
And the goal was to like get these guys

(05:21):
to really feel comfortable.
And I think what we talked about as a
team and what Jeff did really well
and and Jason is to set the style of like
not having to put a lot of restrictions
on them, you know, they didn't have to
think about a lot to
just get the scene done.
And I think we talked about that last
week where there were no marks, really.

(05:42):
There were three was three cameras.
It was all 16.
It was really fast and just put them up.
And they we just saw them all grow and
grow and grow really, really quickly
from this style.
And also because of that style, we could
get a lot of footage
and we got tons of footage.
So it was easier to kind of cut them
together at the beginning.
And then, you know, the dirt on it was

(06:03):
like after after the first season,
you know, we're you know,
obviously we're facing termination
and then a strike is
looming and the strike happens.
And it's just like we're going through
like three regime change regime changes
at NBC over the course
of the time we're there.
I was actually wondering so.
So because that went over five seasons.
Yeah, I didn't realize it
was always even first season.

(06:24):
It was it was up for possible
cancellation because it
was it was kind of always
on the bubble always.
Can you I was actually
going to ask about the improv
at what point through
the five seasons did
did that kind of
improvisation like in all honesty,
I thought the acting and the writing was
so kind of seamless.

(06:45):
I had a feeling that there was
improvisation going on,
but I wasn't able to pinpoint it.
So in the beginning, it was
a little more to the script.
And then as time went on, they were a
little looser with the words.
Like I think it was like that. Exactly.
Like they were very they were on script.
And then as they realized the looseness
of the set and the shooting style,
they were just sort of pop things out,

(07:05):
more improvising would happen.
And then it got to be the point where
maybe they were improvising too much.
And there had to be a conversation with
everybody from the
network out on the set.
Hey, we got to pull it back a little bit.
There was like some of that.
And then eventually, I think everybody
got tired of having to think about
improvising and just
decided to go back to the scripts.
And I think Kyle, Kyle was great because
he was like, I can do that with a look.

(07:27):
And we're like, great.
You know, anytime you can do something
with less dialogue,
we're happy to hear that.
But the all the actors, I think
ultimately, we all they
all really loved each other.
We all really kind of got along is the
same with the writing room.
And, you know, everybody at the studio
network, there was kind
of a crazy like love fest.
There was no assholes or superegoes or,
you know, Jesse, not even K.

(07:48):
Fleming's. He was like, great.
He's a super actor.
So you think that came from the top down
to have that feeling of.
I think it has to, especially with all
the young talent that was on the show
that Pete and Jeff had to be
really open to letting that happen.
And then again, when it got a little out
of control, it had to be pulled back.
And then eventually there
was this fatigue about it.

(08:09):
And so, you know, yeah, it was really it
was really cool, though.
But nobody ever felt like whatever they
were doing was wrong.
It was just like, OK, you know, we're
just going to keep, you know,
we just keep guiding
ourselves to like the right thing.
And that was really what was so cool
about it, because it was just the most
it was just a really
bitch and creative experience.

(08:29):
Well, for it was it common at the time to
have three cameras running?
I worked on a show last year that had
three cameras running.
And it is so freeing as an actor because
you don't have to worry about anything.
You know that you're being, you know, you
know, everything's being being captured.
Everything's being picked up.
So you don't have to worry about, I've
got to get it in this.
This is the why this is the close up.

(08:50):
It's it's a great it's
a great way of working.
I personally I find it
before I answer that question.
Now, what show what show was that?
The Rainmaker. Oh,
awesome. And is that on now?
No, it comes out in August.
Wow. Coming up.
I got to get my got to get my pen out.
So right in my review.

(09:11):
Yeah, that was to answer your question,
no, it was not common at the time, you
know, there this this sort of like
moving camera, punch in, pull back,
rotate kind of documentary style thing.
I mean, that had been done, but Pete
really like nailed it, was nailing it,
especially in the movie.
And then he did it get in the pilot.

(09:32):
And that style was generated from I think
it was an economic choice, really.
It wasn't like you want to do this.
This is like a less
expensive way to shoot.
It's faster.
And it just ended up being an amazing,
creative tool in
terms of creating a style.
So I think a lot of
people followed it after.
But I think it was really I think there
was a few guys doing it.

(09:53):
But one of them was definitely Pete.
Looking back on it,
were you surprised at how
much of a cult favorite that show became?
You know, that's a great question.
And here's what the
actors did that I think
gave me a sense that this
was going to have some legs.
That and the fact we started getting
some, you know, we were
getting great reviews.

(10:13):
And but it was like I would get
you know, I'd read things online at the
time about what people were experiencing
with the show and people were saying
things like I cried three times
or it was so emotional.
It really got to me or
I can totally relate.
So when I started hearing
that, I was like, that is
that is the pinnacle of storytelling.

(10:34):
You know, that's really
the that's the the gold.
That's the pot of gold,
you know, that you search for
to try to get people to be that engaged.
And even though we weren't getting the
numbers, I think a lot of the problems
we found was that I think people thought
it people thought it was a football show.
You know, I mean, very
quickly, it's not a football show.
It's really a story
about about high school.

(10:54):
It's a high school drama.
It's a relationship show.
And football just
happens to be the backdrop.
And as soon as I think people realized
that they weren't going to go
because, you know, one of the things that
we would say in the room was like,
people don't care about football.
They want to watch football.
They can watch it on Saturday or Sunday
or whenever the real guys are playing.
What we had to do is make sure that there
was a story for each character

(11:17):
that was going to be in the game.
So the stakes of that experience that was
happening in the show
would play out on in
the theater of football.
So if Saracen was having
trouble with his grandma, you know,
and grandma was at the game, what did
Saracen have to do to help
grandma understand whatever it was that
they were going through as a

(11:37):
grand as a grandparent and a grandson?
So that's something we always.
Like we had no reason to tell a football
story unless there was a personal story.
The thing that struck me about the book
even was the kind of it was very poignant
because that idea of like being a hero in
high school and then what you do
afterwards, that idea to me was really

(11:58):
that's what I took away from it as well.
Because like I didn't go in with any
knowledge of high school football.
Yeah. You know, I just I just
went in to like kind of blank.
And I remember coming away with that
feeling of like, yeah, you know,
the potential and then the the aftermath
and everything else.
It's a it's a it's a beautiful story, but
it's just really heartbreaking.

(12:20):
You know, if you think about it, it's
really like these these
boys are going to war.
It's for the identity of the town.
I mean, the team wins, the town wins when
the when the boys suffer, the team,
the town suffers, it's you
know, then that time ends.
And now who are you?
You know, my identity is gone.
I no longer belong to this.
You see, you know, we could go to a high

(12:41):
school game and you'd be watching and
you'd see the guys that were the seniors
two years ago kind of in the background
drinking beer and watching the game and
just like their glory days
are over, you know. Yeah.
And I think really sad about that, you
know, but also like you said,
Buzz really did a great job of capturing,
capturing the emotionality
and experience of that.

(13:02):
Speaking of relatability, it's so funny
because as someone from Philly
and South Jersey, I am so not Texas like
nothing about like I enjoy it.
I have friends from Texas, but that
experience is so not me.
I'm an Eagles fan.
You know, go birds.
So besides all of that, I couldn't help
but get wrapped up in the relationships.

(13:24):
That's that storytelling.
And that's the power of the show.
Another thing about the whole, you know,
people thought it was
people thought it was a football show.
That's what people are
saying about the bear right now.
It's like you might
think it's about food.
You might think it's
about working in a restaurant,
but it's about the relationships and
about about, you know, humans.
And I think that's part of the power of
what's what's going on with that show,
too. So I think it has to be.

(13:44):
I think that's quintessential.
I just so it's amazing, like
how often people miss that.
I have to tell you, you're an Eagles fan.
Yeah, Econ. Yeah.
OK, so you want to
hear a Friday night story?
Yeah. So when Jason and I went down to
start researching high school football,

(14:05):
we needed to find a high
school in Texas that we could
you know, that we could
call and say we need to talk.
You know, can you tell us a little bit
about this or kind of plays?
You call or the formations or, you know,
what's it like in the training room?
And we so we went down and there's this
quarterback and he's tall
and he's got this long blonde hair and
he's like the coaches like, you know,

(14:27):
coach didn't give two fucks.
He didn't care about the show.
It was, you know, Austin Westlake.
They had a stadium
like was 20,000 people.
I mean, this was like
it was fucking crazy.
The stadium was like a college stadium.
High school, Texas football.
Like really what we were doing here and
the guy this quarterback,
he shows us around and we call him, we're
connecting with him.
He's always like always

(14:47):
available for he's just great.
He's a great kid and he's really helping
us out and he helps us out a lot.
And then, you know,
he gets a scholarship.
His senior year goes to the University of
Arizona plays there,
ends up playing for the Eagles and
winning a Super Bowl
because that guy was Nick Foles.
No, my God.

(15:09):
By the way, I knew Nick Foles lived in
Austin now currently.
Wow. I when you said Arizona, I was
thinking of a different Eagles player,
but that's not a shock.
He's the greatest guy ever.
Isn't that amazing?
I just love the nicest guy.
I mean, his story is almost
like a Friday Night Lights story.
Once you get a statue in Philly.

(15:31):
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I mean, just like
what a fucking crazy career.
By the way, Patrick, that Super Bowl,
that Nick Foles played in
in Minnesota, I was there.
Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
We don't need to get into too much of
this, but there you go.
I'm a good real life shit.

(15:51):
I mean, but talk about
anyway, I love hearing that.
I'm so glad you shared that.
So so can we kind of get into a little
more of the nuts and bolts?
My question was is is because, you know,
we have a lot of writers
and actors kind of
listening and everything.
When I see all the IMDB credits that say
consulting producer,

(16:11):
co-executive producer, I know that on
Friday Night Lights,
you have a handful of different credits
for certain certain time periods.
Can you kind of explain that a little bit
of what those roles mean?
We may have been consulting, which
basically just consulting
means that you're part time.
You don't have to be
there seven days a week.

(16:32):
You don't have to be there four or five
days a week if you want to.
It was kind of a budgetary thing.
We had never been on a show before.
And then we went from there to, I think,
producer, a co-producer,
which is just like the natural evolution,
you know, because again,
we were just starting our writing career.
Then eventually we become, you know,

(16:52):
executive or co-executive producers.
But that's that's that's just sort of
like every year you get, you know,
if you if you if you know, if you start
off, you usually start off
as like an associate,
then you become a co,
then you become a producer,
then you become an executive
or co-executive and an executive.
And that's like if you're on a show every
year, you should get a bump

(17:12):
or every two seasons or so you should get
a bump up in credit.
It just basically means you have a nicer
credit and a little bit more money.
You know, are you always in the writing
room if you're showing up?
I was in the writing room,
you know, and I had, you know,
I was also on set a lot
and and I was also in post.
So I did a lot vary from show to show the

(17:35):
involvement on set of the writers
or are they always kind of
there, there about, you know,
it's like the really good showrunners
bring put their writers on set.
And some of the really good ones don't.
But most all the ones that
I've worked with did, you know,
you know, Sean Ryan, just all those guys.
Sean sent us to Chicago
and fucking Hawaii was great.

(17:56):
You know, you talked a little
bit about that last time, but
you hit Lara Croft
Tomb Raider fairly early.
You sold some scripts.
Now you transition to TV.
Can you talk about how you
were able to learn the politics?
Well, I think in film is still the same.
It's pretty easy, you know,
it's like the direct
it's a director's medium.

(18:18):
You know, film is really you're kind of
like the director is like,
he's got to make it.
He's like, he's got to
sort of be in charge.
He's got to have his
hands on all the levers.
And he'll let you know how
much he wants to know from you.
You know, some
directors would want you on set.
Others wouldn't.
You know, it's just some it's just like
some directors don't want the writer
around because they want to do stuff and

(18:38):
not have some guy giving them shit.
Regardless, and some directors want you
around and say, hey, you know,
we want to change this line.
What do you think of this?
Or can you think of something?
So it's really kind of a set to set
basis, movie to movie basis.
In terms of that, the best
directors, I feel, you know,
try to keep a writer
pretty close to them.
If it's not the writer that wrote the
script, at least a writer,
because writing is not

(19:00):
directing, you know, it's nothing.
A lot of directors think they, you know,
think they can just write something
because they're directors
and that is not the case.
You know, writing is really hard and it's
it's an art in itself and it's hard.
Now, in TV, it's different.
TV is really a writer's medium in terms
of production because,
you know, the showrunner has to run

(19:20):
everything, not the directors,
because the showrunners are
the ones that are sticking around
for every single episode.
They know what's going on in every
episode, you know, with the story,
with costume, with the sets where we're
going to be, the locations, the budgets.
Everything filters through
that central sort of point
of the showrunner, the show running team.

(19:40):
So they're more in charge.
And then the hierarchy in a writing room
is really a good writing room.
There'll be no hierarchy.
They'll be like everybody gets to share,
everybody gets to talk.
There should be a safe environment for
your to put out good ideas and bad ideas.
It shouldn't be criticized.
You have a preference between
the writers room and a TV show

(20:00):
or on a movie where it's different, where
it's it's kind of your writing
the movie and you're getting notes and
whatever and you're adjusting.
Do you prefer that that collaborative
environment in that way?
Or do you prefer the more, you know, not
more solo, but like, you know,
man, that's a really,
really good question, Rand.
And I got to say that, again, it's a
project to project basis.

(20:21):
You know, when I was, you know, there's
just been a lot of great
shows that I was on that I just I
wouldn't trade that for anything.
You know, it was just such a good, a good
process and such a good group of people.
Like, you know, like all the like the
ones we've talked about,
it's like last slide Chicago Code.
Those were great experiences.
And I also had the same thing on movie
sets where it's been great.

(20:43):
So it's really it's really
a project to project basis.
You can do the preference.
Rian, I think in general, it's it's kind
of like what Patrick is saying.
The environment is so different.
So I think it just kind of depends on it.
It's kind of nice to have variety between
the two personally for me.
Econ, have you if you have you had
experiences with like,
if there have been some really good

(21:03):
experiences with directors
and some of the
episodics that you've done,
where you feel like you were able to have
a dialogue with them,
because some directors in the rotation
are really good with actors
and other ones just don't want anything
to do with the actors.
Just set the shot.
Let me get the shot.
You know, and don't really communicate a
whole lot with talent.

(21:23):
I mean, what's your 100 percent?
And you do you prefer one where that you
prefer to be left alone
and let I got this or
do you want direction?
For the most part, my TV experience is I
never got tons of direction,
but it was nice to have an
open dialogue with the director
where the director sets the tone.
Hey, let's let's kind of.
So this is kind of like what's happening.

(21:43):
They don't need to over talk and they
don't need to
micromanage every every take.
But it's an open dialogue.
I'm here. I'm watching.
I'm paying attention to
you where many TV experiences
never introduce themselves.
Not one word of direction.
And sometimes where I was this is a
longer story, but I'm a paramedic.

(22:05):
Here's the gurney.
Here's all your medical tape.
You're wearing plastic gloves.
And I'm trying to work
through all this and time the scene.
And it's one of those
things where it's like, you know,
I'm trying to be polite and kind of, you
know, taking up ownership of, OK,
I'm doing this. And if I question, well,

(22:25):
this is what's happening
or your lead actor is
fumbling her monologue.
I'm so low on the totem pole where, you
know, the director thinks it's a power
trip. He'll just look at me.
He's like, are you are you
really doing this right now?
And I'm like, I am not doing anything.
Let me just keep going on my
way and let me just do this.

(22:46):
I do my job and in the
least amount of takes.
I'm not going to need direction, but it
would be nice to know that, hey,
we're all working on the same team.
So I've seen both sides and I prefer
someone who's nicer personally for me.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Same. Yeah.
I think I think the truth, the reality
for that is like is

(23:07):
like it's so stressful.
There's so much that you want to pack in.
I think directors want to pack in so much
into their episodes.
And there's so little time
and there's a budget constraint.
And, you know, I'm sure I'm almost sure
almost all directors would love to have
a 10 day rehearsal period, you know, and
just really work through all their stuff.

(23:28):
But they just they
have to keep moving, man.
TV to me often feels like just jumping
into a fast moving river that's already
flowing and you just have
to try and keep above water.
Like you just have to try and keep up and
not fuck it up and just kind of stay,
you know, stay at rest of the situation.
Whereas to your point, he kind of like a
movie, depending on

(23:48):
the scale of the movie
on a bigger movie, slightly different,
but like in a small like an indie movie,
there's there's a real
camaraderie about and I love TV.
I really do. I love the process of it.
But a smaller like an indie movie,
there's a camaraderie about like,
we're all trying to get this thing made.
We don't have a ton of money.
You know what I mean?
We've just enough money to get this thing

(24:09):
made if nothing goes wrong.
And there's a real kind
of a togetherness in that.
Whereas TV, the directors
are dropping in and out.
The actors are dropping in and out.
You have the you know, your series
regulars who maybe are there from start
to finish, you know, from season one to
season for the last season.
Maybe not. That changes over time, too.
But I think at a certain level, you're

(24:29):
dropping in and just
trying to just trying
to just trying to get to grips with
everything and do your
job and hop out again.
And I think that's a
really great description.
You know, you want to be a part of the
flow if you can, you know,
and understanding like, you know, this is
you're a piece of this this thing.
Think about like show running man in

(24:50):
terms of like the
pace and what's going on.
You're always going to have a room where
you're developing a script.
You're always going to have a script
that's going through the vetting process
getting notes and getting dialed in to
get ready and getting.
You're always going to have another.
These are all different projects, all
happening at the same time.
You're going to have

(25:10):
another one that's in prep.
You're going to have
another one that's shooting.
You may have another one that's doing
some reshoots with B camp with the second
clean, then you're going to have then
you're going to be in
post and delivering.
So you've almost got like five projects
going on at the same time.
You know, that's
that's a very good point.
Yeah, now you do some

(25:30):
writing, you know, so it's really,
you know, luckily, I just
felt like I had this nice flow,
you know, the totem pole and Friday night
lights got along with it.
We all got along really well.
And I was really lucky to be able to be
asked to go work in post, you know,
where I got a chance.
Oh, you were asked to go.

(25:50):
So that's not that's not assumed, but you
were invited to the process.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I got a
lot of I was lucky to
be asked to do a lot
of like besides like just writing script
with John to also make sure that all the
football stuff in
every script was accurate.
If it was a practice or a conversation
about recruiting or whatever it was,

(26:12):
I had Jason always just said, take a look
at this and make sure it feels right.
And I always find I got a chance to
really get my hands
on almost every script
because every script, if
there wasn't a game or practice,
there was always
something about football going on.
So can I just add, can I just add a high
school football got you into acting class
and it also got you
into Friday night lights?

(26:32):
You being a football player.
And then I and I got that I was blessed
to be able to coach my son in football
when he was a kid and he became a
quarterback and, you know,
he had a big amount of state himself.
And so it's just football has been very
good to Patrick, you know.
Yeah.
So can you talk about your experience
when you were in the editing process?

(26:53):
Would you would you learn as a writer?
Did it change your writing?
Well, first of all, these editors were
incredible because they got so much
footage in the style that we were talking
about, guys, that generates three cameras
rolling all the time.
It just generates a lot of raw footage
that the editors had to go through.
So the assistant editors have to weed

(27:13):
through all that stuff and just like look
at everything that didn't have a flaw in
it, you know, and then they had
to read that down to like,
how can we cut this together?
They're geniuses.
And what I would do is I would come in
and help cut together the football game,
you know, and I would write and and and I
would voice, you know,
Dylan Panthers tonight, folks, let's see

(27:35):
how these guys can do.
We've got no work.
But Saracen is not having a great night,
but we'll see how this plays out, folks.
Stick around. I mean, so I got to I got
to help work on cutting.
Not the body of the episodes, but the
football games, which to me was the best
part, was the funnest part.
And then I do the dialogue and stuff and
write all that extra dialogue.

(27:56):
And that you need to
like, we need something here.
It's fourth and one. Can
you say something here?
You know, they got to
get a first down to win.
And then in season four, the guy.
That was doing the voice they couldn't
get, they couldn't get his deal done.
So they asked me to do it.
So I had to voice the answer on Friday

(28:16):
Night Lights for the last two years.
So you got an acting check.
I got an acting career.
Yeah, I will say if anyone
watches the football sequences,
the football sequences were looked real
gritty, hard hitting.
I mean, those scenes were great.
The fact that those were what you were
watching and editing.
That's kind of awesome.
Yeah, again, great sports choreographer,

(28:39):
you know, and also we would take the time
to rehearse those those games.
We had great
acting doubles that would come in real
Texas, like University of X,
University of Texas football players that
would come in and stand in for
you know, Riggins or for
Saracen or whoever it was.
So, you know, everybody just

(28:59):
wanted to be a part of that.
And I think that comes across, you know,
all the enthusiasm and excitement that
people had to make these
games feel gritty and tough.
Like you just you described it perfectly.
That's what we were going for.
That's awesome. Yeah.
I had a quick question just
about the process of that.
So like so there's a book of this show
and then there's a there's a movie

(29:20):
and then there's this pilot.
And then I suppose my question is so you
get this kind of starting point and then
you have to write the
stories of all these
different characters going in and
intertwining going all
these different directions.
How where do you start with that?
Like it's it's such a fascinating process

(29:41):
to me, like the daunting task of like,
how do we create a world here and how do
you choose what characters to kind of
create and bring in and where do they go?
Like I'm just I'm so
in awe of that process.
I just I can't like get
enough of hearing about it.

(30:09):
Is that we would set up the season like
we would put up on
the board like game one,
game three, game one, game two games and
we would say, OK, we're going to we can
afford this is 13 episodes this year, we
can afford seven games.
How are we going to use them?
Well, obviously we want to stay and we
want to start off with a good game in the
beginning and we distribute.
So this would be like this
sort of arc of the games.

(30:30):
Now, what do we want to
have happen in each game?
We had to go back and
like, you know, and again,
a credit to Jason and this amazing room,
we wanted to make sure that every
character had a story,
you know, what is the story?
And we would think what's the story of
the season for Coach?
What's the story of
the season for Landry?
Like in Landry's story, we'll say, well,

(30:51):
he's going to get a girlfriend
and he's going to become a little bit
more part of the thing.
And by the end of the
season, he's going to,
you know, fall in love or whatever it is.
And so so we try to figure out I can't
remember the arcs
now, but we try to figure
like what's where do we want to go?
Where do you like? Well, in this story,
re-in is going to go from being like a
guy who's really been busting,

(31:12):
busting his ass, he's close on the edge
to, you know, having this amazing career.
He keeps getting this great little spots
and then finally, bam,
nails the big one and he shits the bed
and the critics hate him.
Oh, man, I was loading that
story up until the finale.
So that's basically what we do.
And then and you may do

(31:32):
the nitty gritty work.
Every episode had to be
broken down into a really deep
kind of, you know, outline 20K dialogue
that we'd all sort of look at and see,
like, this is the story.
And then and then it would be from that
would be that that one would be
handed to a writer and that writer would
go right to, you know, right.

(31:52):
And also sometimes people would come in
with ideas like,
let's do an episode about
where this happens or I saw this thing on
TV where this happened to this player.
Could we do a story on that?
And so that would be another
inspiration that we would take.
This is this is great.
I want to get more.
I want to get more
into the writing process.
But before we leave Friday Night Lights,
can you talk a little bit about Jesse

(32:14):
Plemons just as a young actor?
I'll never forget when I was watching
Justin Plemons, he crushed every line,
everything that came out of his mouth
was kind of pitch perfect, I thought.
Are you surprised at how much success
he's gotten as the
years go on that I would
lie to you if I said that I wasn't
surprised only because he seemed to be

(32:36):
in the shadow of Reagan, of, you know, of
Taylor and who went on to do like this
last thing Taylor did with
or that one thing I saw it.
Taylor did since his since Friday Night
Lights with the Koresh thing,
the Texas Waco thing,
amazing performances.
But I don't think anybody really saw it.
I mean, the onset and
around him, he was funny.
He was witty. He was charming.

(32:58):
He was available.
And who he is, you know, that sort of
drive back, you know, lay back, sharp,
biting sense of humor.
He just nailed that in the show.
He was loved by all of us.
He wanted to write for him
as a person and as an actor.
Just one more question I had on the
process of the of the creating of shows.

(33:18):
And it was actually sort of, you know,
when you mentioned you wanted to write
for Jesse Plamons as an actor, peripheral
characters and costars and people.
Are they when you're writing those roles,
are they just to kind of fill a purpose
in the script for that for that episode?
And then what what makes you
want to write them in more?

(33:39):
Is it just necessity or is it something
in that actor's performance?
Or, you know, is there some reason that
actors then their
part can grow and they're
kind of, you know, we see more of them
and they grow as characters?
Is there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Great, great question.
I think as a showrunner, you want all of
your characters to pop,
even if they're these small peripheral
guys, you want them to pop.
And if you see a little spark in them,

(34:02):
that's where you want to write for.
Like Jesse had this spark, you know,
you wanted to figure out
how to get him more involved.
And and then I think we
I think we got him to be.
We wanted him to get
closer into the team.
But to answer your question, yeah, if you
see like something in his performance
and also, you know, they're a good
person, you know, they can handle it.
You want to write for them.
You want to say, like, well, let's get

(34:22):
him more stories, get him more involved.
And it doesn't have to
happen in one episode.
It can happen over the course of the
season or something.
But, you know, that's
what you really want.
You want it. And we were so lucky that we
wanted to write to everybody.
They're all of our
characters. We just love them.
How can we get them all a story?
And like, so what we did in the part of
the process, we're like, OK, let's do
let's tell a story about where Taylor

(34:43):
goes to visit Street at the hospital.
Let's do it in three beats.
Like what are the three?
So that's how you sort of
like that's how you manage it.
You get it down.
Well, it's the first beat.
So that's it. Then
you get the three beats.
Then you put that on the board.
And you got the three beats of the Taylor
kits going to visit Jason Street story
or Riggins rather. And that's that's sort
of like that's just sits there.
Then you got to go to school
and then with the next one.

(35:03):
So you start to just
build each of these scenes.
And like we got to do a big
five beater, five beats with
you know, Lila and
whoever, you know, just
so that's another piece of like what you
how you just manage all that story.
Yeah. Well, and
there's a lot of talk about

(35:23):
current TV shows trying to trim cast to
cut costs, fewer actors.
And this is one of those things where I
feel like it's being sacrificed sometimes
where, you know, people studios are
trying to save money and, you know,
plugging in smaller characters without
giving them a full life or, you know,
at least a story there.
It's just so small thinking creatively.
You know, you want to get

(35:43):
what you need to tell the story.
Now, if you don't need a character, if
you don't need them to tell the story,
then maybe they're not
they're not important.
But if there is that character could
become Jesse, you know,
could become Jesse
Plumbing at the end of the season.
You've got to give things time.
You got to let things grow.
You know, it's like, God, everybody just
wants it all to be perfect.

(36:04):
It's just like that's just
not how the business works.
It's not how this process works.
I remember you said last time someone
sent you Robert McKee's story.
Story tapes.
How did you evolve your
your storytelling skills?
Well, I think it's like I learned like
that night and that night at the Pearl
Bar where I ran into another young writer

(36:24):
who was trying to make it.
He said, I got these tapes, man.
Like it was drugs for to buy the books.
We're all somebody had
bootlegged a copy of his lecture.
And so I end up hooking up with this guy
and literally putting in the cassettes.
And I listened to him
fucking over and over.
He was calling me. I
ate my tapes back, man.

(36:44):
So but in those days in that
book that Robert McKee wrote,
which I still think is the best book,
because it's of its depth,
because it gives you a really basic,
grounded, fundamental understanding
of how to tell a story in acts, you know,
how to tell the inside the incident,

(37:06):
the first act, the pinch, the reversal,
all these basic things
that once you learn them and you really
put them, you know, it's like music.
You can't really play jazz until you
learn all the fundamentals of music.
I think gives you all these
basics, all these fundamentals.

(37:26):
And I just remember them.
I just I've never forgotten them.
Whatever whatever I'm writing, I'm going
to like I'm going to either know
I'm playing by the rules or I'm going to
be I'm choosing to break the rules.
But at least I know them.
So I think that was
something I mean, in terms of like,
have I been lucky or the
other guys? Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, everybody's
everybody's got their their fate.

(37:49):
I don't but I don't know if this has
anything to do with whether or not I keep
working or not. I just know for me, I
can't I can never get away from the
fundamentals and maybe
the same thing in golf.
I know Tom Brady had six, you know,
always had five or six
quarterback coaches around him. Now, what
are those guys teaching him?
They're reminding him of the fundamentals
of football, dance and a position
and of hip turn. And it's

(38:10):
the same thing with writing.
I think all the I think all really,
really good writers, you know,
understand fundamentally like we need a
certain thing to create an experience,
you know, take an audience in one
direction and then turn it on.
And they're going to have an emotional
experience, you know,
give people to invent advertisement by
them being honest and being relatable

(38:30):
and then take something away.
It's just like, you know, you don't you
don't want to think of those as tricks.
You just want to think of
those as like little guideposts.
You said you got to know the rules to
know when to break them.
Does anything come to
mind when, you know,
times that you've broken the rules when
you were writing something or tell me a
story? Yeah, I think when
when we were doing gold,

(38:50):
you know, we were sort of
we got to talk about gold.
When we were John, we were writing that
we were blending genres, you
know, and we were playing with
we were playing with
cinematic styles and structure.
So, yeah, we were breaking rules.
We weren't like we were playing like by
the exact way you're supposed to do it.

(39:11):
And so you could have said, is this five
acts or is it seven?
I mean, we had all these like the way you
would nerd out and try to like break it
down genre styles that don't necessarily
work within certain act styles.
So,
yeah, that we knew we knew we were doing.
And we were like, well, this is the way

(39:32):
because I think when you write more acts,
you know, you generally movies in three,
you know, that's the
basic Robert McKeway.
And then he talks about five.
But you can also do seven.
But the reason that we like the more act
breaks is because you just got more
emotional fucking churn.
You know, the end of the first act is
really always a big
turn for the character.

(39:52):
And the more we just felt like the more
you had in those, the more
emotional it was going to be.
And for people that don't know, Matthew
McConaughey is the big star 2016.
Yeah, it also it also helped me get a job
one time because remember I had a I had a
callback with Bryce Dallas Howard who
was directing the thing

(40:13):
that I ended up booking.
But in the callback in the room, you had
told me that she was
in gold and I brought it up in the room
and said, oh, Patrick, massive.
Says hi. And she's like, oh, Patrick,
tell him I love the script.
Nice. There you go.
What a wonderful.
What a lady.

(40:33):
Yeah. Wow.
What a dream to work with as well.
Yeah. I mean, so I need to say this,
Patrick, you've been so
generous with your time.
Thank you so much.
I want to ask, what is a
writing day look for you?
Routines, habits, any tips that you can
give to up and coming screenwriters?

(40:53):
Sure.
And I would also just like to say, you
know, in regards to
me giving you my time,
it's like, honestly, you guys are cool
and nobody ever asks
the writers what they
think ever the last writer,
the last writer to be
able to greenlit a movie,
the movie was named Patty Chayefsky and,

(41:14):
you know, I think maybe William Goldman.
So it's been a while since we've had any,
you know, impact on.
So you guys are, you know, back to
someone who wants to talk to me.
I'm like, sure, I'll talk to everybody.
You guys are so cool.
I loved I love this stuff.
I love learning about this.
Actually, like I find, you know,

(41:35):
honestly, in all the in the business,
writers are the most
knowledgeable really about story.
I mean, directors are great storytellers
and producers are all.
Everyone's great, but writers, man, it's
like you're in there.
You're in the trenches.
You're the rubber meets the road.
It's every day trying to,
you know,
tell a story and make sense of things and

(41:57):
make I respect writers so much.
I don't care if you're just a kid
starting out writing B
action movies or you're
like, if you won seven Academy Awards,
it's hard and it's you have to love it.
Extremely gratifying.
But you have to really
you really have to love it.
It's like anything else.
If you love it, you know, you're never

(42:17):
going to work a day in your life.
And I think I've been
blessed to have that experience.
If you talk to actors, they're always
looking for great material.
And you talk to a lot of directors.
A lot of times that they get their first
start is because they have
to write their own material.
Why for something to direct me, because
it's so hard to find to thread the needle
in terms of what's it what's the story is

(42:37):
relevant, important,
entertaining, whatever.
And also how to execute it.
You know, my first job and I'll get into
my routine in a second.
My first job in really in this business
besides acting was covering scripts.
I would get fifty to
seventy five dollars a script.
And there's this little company called
Live Entertainment that was around and

(42:58):
they're getting movies made.
And there's this guy that he kind of he's
a producer and he kind of took me under
his wing a little bit and he goes, yeah,
so I was paying the bills, man, by going
and getting three or four or five going,
I drive over, get a box like a banker's
box full of scripts and I get I try to go
through three or four at a time.
And my wife was working with me.

(43:19):
She was helping me.
We would read and
write and get these things.
That would make two or two or three
hundred dollars a day.
You know, just.
But what I what I learned about
storytelling from that experience was
that almost every script I read
was a really good idea.

(43:40):
Just like, wow,
that's a really cool idea.
But the execution was most
of the time it was awful.
That and that's what I realized about
I was going to be I was really going to
pursue writing that I had to learn how
to really execute at a really high level
in order to even get noticed.
You're not fighting
with the ideas out there.
There's a lot of great
ideas, plenty of great ideas.

(44:01):
How do you execute?
In fact, when John and I did we're doing
gold, we were pitching it around town.
We had done Tomb Raider and Friday Night
Lights and a few other things.
But then everyone was like, well, this is
a really complicated, deep kind of
multi genre kind of thing.
It's really this is what they said.
It's really execution oriented.
You know, we'll make this

(44:21):
if you can execute this.
So that was that was the prompt for us to
go and write a spec.
Which, you know, ended up black.
The biggest sale at Berlin, I think it
was 15 million dollars.
And just to present this, the foreign
sale at pre sale at Berlin was
it was it was like just there was a lot
of great things around that.
And then Matthew McConaughey turned onto

(44:41):
the scene and he just absolutely has this
incredible vision of the character, you
know, which I'll get into in a second.
Let me go back to that routine.
If that's OK. You know, this is a lot of
it has to do with my
getting ready to write.
I have to do a lot of
personal stuff first.
The thing I do when I wake up is I try to
say a prayer, you know, I'm not I'm

(45:03):
non-religious. I don't have a specific
God that is in any manual or
text or, you know, holy book.
It's just a God of my
choosing and reading.
And then I do a song.
I take a whole nother story.
I take a 30 to 40 minute sauna after

(45:24):
prayer and meditation and I do Tai Chi.
And then I do CrossFit.
And that's my routine every day.
That sounds like it could be six hours.
It's usually about an hour and a half to
two hours, you know, because my CrossFit
is about 15 minutes. I do
a really fast high energy.
You get to help it up. I'm an old man.
You get to get your heart rate up thing.

(45:44):
And then I sit down and I begin to I
begin to look at the day's writing.
You know, I try not to think
about it until that moment.
And the trick for me is if I want to
write great, if I
don't feel like I want to
write, no matter if I can
just sit down and tell myself,
Econ, like, I'm just going
to write for five minutes.
The script, the material, whatever I'm

(46:06):
working on will give me energy.
And the next thing I know,
two or three hours go by.
But as soon as I start
reading, oh, I can make that better.
Oh, I can make that. Oh,
that's a little different.
That can be funny. Next thing I know, I'm
just totally into it.
But I so I learned from a
very young age, if I just start,
I'll be able to keep going.
But you got to start, you know, and I

(46:26):
think that's for a lot of young writers
that I've worked with and I work with a
lot of young writers and I'm happy to do
it, it's them just being so
freaked out about starting.
You know, like they're
afraid of the result.
They're so far into the future.
They're not giving themselves a chance to
really discover and to be artists
because they're afraid of the results.
You know, fear is the biggest enemy of,

(46:47):
in my opinion, of a writer.
And it certainly can be for me.
So that's that's my that's my day.
And I and I still to this day, I love
writing if I'm not on a
job, which is not very
I hasn't really I've never really not had
a job since I started
professionally until
COVID I write some writing something,

(47:08):
man, I got to write.
I got to be involved.
It's either developing a pitch or writing
a script or giving notes to someone.
Or I just love it so much.
I'm very lucky to love what I do.
I love that is I'm actually very much,
you know, I'm finding these little tricks
and habits and I often write as well.
And I'm also creating my own project.
And I'm trying to I always thought

(47:29):
personally for myself, I
need to get into the body
and the mind, do this creative work.
And I like to do it
first thing in the morning.
I like to do it after a workout.
I like to have a cup of
coffee if I need a little to start.
And I want to feel a great move to create
because I know how hard it is.
And so you're kind of reaffirming that.
Good. It's proven that routine is really

(47:52):
essential in a lot of just to some
people, to me, it's really essential.
Now, that whole program that is
described, it took me
nine years to develop that.
I mean, I started when I first had once
this sort of life change,
I felt I'm going to stop drinking and and
doing other things like that and really
sort of look more spiritually, look more
inward into my life.
Basically, I was just doing the prayer

(48:12):
and meditation part.
And then slowly, I just felt like I
needed more and I became like a vegan.
I just thought, well, let's just try to
help see how your body feels.
You don't eat other animals, you know,
just just for myself
because I don't judge.
I mean, I love me.
But I decided to try that.
And then in that work and then I thought,
well, maybe I should lose some.
I lost 60 pounds, you know, through this
through like just through

(48:35):
changing my diet and doing CrossFit.
But then I felt like I needed something
else because meditation and just sitting
was so sometimes it was great, but I had
heard of this thing called a moving
meditation, which was Tai
Chi, and I got into that.
And so this whole thing developed.
So I would say to anybody who's thinking
about starting a routine, start small.
You start with like one thing that you

(48:55):
feel like you can
manage every day that you
feel is going to be helpful in doing what
you want to do if it's writing or acting
or whatever it is, you know, absolutely.
I love that. And just a
little question on that
because you were already successful in
working for a long time and then you only
found this routine

(49:15):
for the past nine years.
Was there anything that
kind of pushed you towards
searching for something else and
searching for something more deeper?
What caused that shift?
Because that's a pretty big shift that
kind of eventually happened.
Well, it was a really
big life thing, Econ.
It was like and Ria knows this pretty
well, but it was more
like it was like I just
felt empty. I just felt like I had had

(49:37):
all the success that I had.
I mean, I'm not like, you
know, five Academy Award guy.
I'm just a really guy who got really
lucky, got some great shows,
worked with some great people, got a few
movies made, worked really hard, though.
You can't take that away from me.
I worked like an art, but I had all that
stuff and I just kind of felt like empty.
There was no sense of like I was looking

(49:59):
at life the wrong way.
I was looking at for some reason, I was
looking for something that I couldn't
reach and I just kept
feeling like it was all meaningless, you
know, and that spiraled down into the
selfishness and the self centeredness and
pushing people I love away.
And
and so I sort of had I hit a bottom and I
had in that bottom, I had a spiritual

(50:20):
awakening and it it got me on this other
path that I absolutely am blessed and
grateful to be a part of.
Wow, I love powerful.
And that's the kind of stuff
I mean, that fires me open.
Obviously, you know, we've we've had
similar experiences in that and in,
you know, quitting drinking and
establishing a routine.

(50:40):
And mine mine very similarly to yours was
a very gradual thing.
You know, the prayer, the
meditation built up over time.
I've involved some
other things in it now.
And it just that's what sets me up.
And if I don't get to do
it for whatever reason,
it kind of throws my
day off a little bit.
You know, from the from the writing and
the acting and the creative side of it,

(51:02):
I think I mentioned this
before, I had a solution.
I think a lot of guys have this illusion
that the drugs and
alcohol are really helpful.
They really get you open and law and it's
just completely a lie.
That's a complete that my alcoholism was
telling me, stick with me, man.
I'm going to get you through this when it
was killing me and my writing,

(51:23):
my sense of experience of being a human
being, of being a man, being a father,
being a husband, being a friend, it all
elevated because of changing those those
things. You don't
lose you don't lose your
creative edge because you stopped
crawling out of garbage bins.
Yeah.
And so on this note, as far as

(51:45):
relationships, working with other people.
So you you've always had a longtime
collaborator, John Zimman,
through throughout all these projects,
you both have been working together.
Yeah, most of them.
You know, the story with John was that I
was trying to I was trying to break in.
I'd written a bunch of stuff and I'd gone
to, you know, great lengths to try to get

(52:08):
a spec sale and and nothing had worked.
And finally, I was writing was one thing
I felt like really had a chance.
So I went to John asking for notes.
He gave me a round of notes because I
knew I'd known him from a theater company
and I sold it.
You know, I think I
talked about that last time.
It's like paid the bills.
You know, we were down here like my wife
and I were like three kids and 100,
thousand two thousand dollars in debt and

(52:29):
buying on the rent and everything else.
And got to sale.
But John helped me. So we went out that
that a couple of
nights later to celebrate.
We had a really good time and decided to
write a spec together.
We did that spec got us
this video adaptation
called Battle Zone, which we did.
They did. We did a great job on.
And that links up to

(52:50):
the Tomb Raider story,
because at that point, Larry Gordon and
Lloyd Levin called us in and said,
we'd loved your script.
We're not sure we're going to make this
yet, but we want to
know what you guys want
to do next. But in terms
of the terms of the work,
he has strong suits. I have strong suits.
We argue a lot. We agree a lot.
It's like any it's like any
other long term relationship.

(53:11):
You know, you need some time away.
He's done projects on his own.
I've done projects on my
own, but we mostly collaborate.
And every project is different.
You know, honestly, I wish I could say
that there was a set
pattern that we went by.
But, you know, sometimes she'll be on
point with something.
If he feels more energized to it,
sometimes we'll do it together.
And sometimes I'll be on point and I'll
say this is, you know,

(53:31):
it's better. It's kind of like that's the
best version, really, because then you
don't have something you agree that
someone's going to be able to make the
final decision, because a lot of times
it's hard if you want to do it completely
equally and everybody and you have to
agree on everything together, you're not
going to get very far. And we learned
that pretty early on where we
had both go, well, I don't agree.
We don't agree that it's just like, OK,
let's just decide that one person is in

(53:52):
charge of each project and the other
person we argue and debate.
But finally, someone has the final say or
we call a final pass.
And so that's that's how that goes.
I love that. I've
never heard that before.
Actually, I have had a long time writing
partner for a while and I was always
curious how writing teams decide if

(54:13):
there's if there's a stalemate.
How do you decide to make that decision?
And agree before you begin that someone
is in charge and then you have to just
accept it. You have to be in this place.
It's pretty.
That's fucking a really bad choice.
And you're making a big
fucking mistake, you idiot.
Fine.
Yeah.
Do you do you have a favorite?

(54:34):
Just in light of that, like, do you have
a favorite part of this job?
Like, is it sitting down in front of a
blank page with an idea?
Is it is it pitching?
Is it being on a set?
Is it in a writer's room?
You know, what's the what's
the what's the buzz for you?
Or is it all just stuff that you enjoy?
That's a great that's
a great question, man.
And honestly, the funnest part for me is

(54:57):
hearing about an idea or thinking about
an idea or reading an article or having a
conversation with someone and getting an
idea and then just really working it up
in my head and, you know, writing down
the initial thoughts.
And it's the beginning, man.
It's that it's that it's like, you know,
when you just have all this fresh energy
towards something and you have a vision
for it and you're just like, oh, man,

(55:18):
this is going to be fantastic.
And it's before anybody else comes in and
says you can't do this or you can't do
that. Maybe you should
try this, which is great.
It's the process. It's pre collaboration.
That really is by far the most fun part.
But it's all yeah, all fucking great.
I love that.
And can you kind of talk about how,
because there's such a long process,

(55:40):
especially if it's film, that pre
collaboration is such a small percentage
of the entire experience. And
I know that you love writing.
But if that's the best part, how do you
survive through all the parts that aren't
as fun? I have.
I'm always looking for new stuff to do.
So even if I've got right now I'm doing

(56:00):
literally we have two pitches out and we
have two pitches on deck and I've got
them and I just got a I just got a book
that I picked up that I
love and I want to adapt.
So I'm always in that phase, you know,
but I'm also in the phase of first draft.
I'm also in the phase of rewrite.
I'm also in the phase of production, but
I'm always feeding myself the new idea.

(56:24):
It's not feeling like, you know, you
can't survive on one thing.
When I was like, when IMDB came out, they
had this list on the right side of your
name of all your stuff in development,
you can go look at it
and they have these lists.
And I decided to go to Spielberg's list.
I was Steven Spielberg
and see what he's done.
He's like 40 things in development.
I'm like, oh, that's how you do it.

(56:46):
To get one thing made, you have to have
10 thing in the can or 10 thing ready,
10 things that you're working on.
So so you got always look at it.
Some part of my day is
dedicated to that, to that new part.
I think that's I think
that's true of actors as well.
I love that because I think the more the
busier I am and the more involved I am in

(57:07):
in a class, in, you know, auditioning,
prep, like whatever it
is, the more of what I
do, the less precious I get about any one
part of it, the more auditions I have,
the less attached I am to the
outcome of any one audition.
And I'm just doing it.
I'm in the flow of it.
And I think it's it's
possibly something similar.
It might be slightly different as a
writer, but I love

(57:27):
that the the idea of you
being in all of those things, all of
those phases at the same time.
That's a really cool way to live.
Things that you think are going to rock
just end up dying and things that you're
just like, what next?
That's like, let's go.
It's just it's hard to tell.
How do you guys how do you guys as actors
in this day and age?

(57:48):
We're so less personal, but still, but
maybe even but maybe more fun in terms
of creating your own
auditions and that sort of thing.
How do you guys deal with rejection?
You've nailed it. You
know, you've done a good job.
You know, you like did
everything you could possibly do.
And they still going
a different direction.
Patrick, you would appreciate this.

(58:08):
Just yesterday, I posted a short of
of a bit of our first session together.
And it was you talking about how
rejection doesn't bother you.
How about you how you did everything in
your power and you had faith that I did
everything I could do and I literally
just posted yesterday.
I was like, this is such a brilliant
little bit that really resonated with me.

(58:31):
Experience
carries a lot being in class, but I've
I've known this for years,
but I didn't realize it until now, having
a life helps out a lot.
It's kind of like what you're saying,
where you have other things that you're
working on, you're always in that fire.
So, you know, there might be something
that you might have got rejected for
for an audition that
happened two weeks ago.

(58:52):
I don't even remember it anymore.
Yeah. So I think having a life and trying
to have a fulfilled life, working out,
being healthy, all that helps the train
keep going, having other
things to look forward to.
It's like, hey, me and Rene, Rene and I,
every week we're talking about something
that may or may not be
really scary in the industry.

(59:12):
Like, let's be honest here.
We don't know what's going to happen two
or five years from
now, but we're working.
We're always having something that we're
working on and moving towards something.
Rejection doesn't bother me as much.
So that is your role.
You just describe is how you survive
in a brutal industry where art is
criticized and rejection is rampant.

(59:35):
And necessarily so.
A lot of people want
these one things, you know.
And so it's like it's
just part of reality.
But what you just described to
me is like how people survive.
Because I have a lot of friends that
rejection ruins them.
It'll ruin them for a
week or two or a month.
And they wrote this thing
and nobody wants to read it.
Everyone's.
And it's just like a
lot of young writers.

(59:56):
And I try to impart to them this idea of
of being the shield of self satisfaction.
It's no, but it's hard.
It's really hard.
A lot of talented people go to the side
because they can't
handle that part of our job.
Absolutely. And I think for me, like you
can't say, like it's experience as well.
And it's experience, not just experience,

(01:00:17):
but learning over time to not conflate
your identity as a human being with your
job and, you know,
putting success in your
job as a valuation of of who you are.
It's also learning to love all the parts
of it like you
described, like learning to
love the audition. I love auditions now.
I love getting tapes to do because it's
like a little puzzle and I get to work on

(01:00:39):
it and let it go. I
really enjoy the buzz of that.
And then learning from people better than
me and being in a class and just learning
to love all the different parts of it.
And, you know, sometimes, you know,
sometimes it will get
to me if I've done a lot
of auditions and I didn't book any of
them, like I feel it, you know, I'm like,
oh, but it's temporary because it's it's

(01:00:59):
it's it's it's just part of the process
now. And I didn't always feel like this.
But having a routine like you mentioned
is key because it brings in that
positivity like it kind of infuses that
positivity into my day and is my
experience of this job and then being
really grateful for every opportunity to
do it. But I've had to over time learn to
love all the different aspects of it and

(01:01:21):
all the parts of it and also have a life
that has meaning outside of this thing.
This is a great transition.
Patrick, can you talk a little bit about
pitching because in a way that's writer's
version of auditioning. Yeah, I just want
to add to that last thing real quick.
You know, it's that, you know, it's like
what I'm saying about like that.

(01:01:42):
It's just like, you
know, you did a great job.
I did everything I possibly could.
Rejection bounces off.
That that that's not always the case.
Just so you know, like sometimes
rejection just stings.
But for me, it's not to get stuck in it.
I can experience the grief.
I can experience the
disappointment, but to know.
But I know I did a good job.
I have a life. I have

(01:02:02):
my family, my friends.
I have other things. I
got to ride my motorcycle.
I got to go play guitar. I got to do
whatever I want to do.
I have a great life.
So just go enjoy that.
You know, so the pitching.
Yeah, pitching's changed, man.
It's really gotten through a real
a real just evolution in itself.

(01:02:22):
It used to be the good old age.
You'd work up a pitch.
It would be, you know, it's always been
about the same length.
Twenty, thirty minutes.
Maybe if you wanted to
go longer, you could.
But you really wanted to just you
couldn't like a lot of times
if you can't tell the whole story, you
got to tell the heart of the story.
You got to there's this old funny line,
sell this sizzle, not the steak, I think.

(01:02:44):
So what's the really crackling impact
part of the story you want to tell?
You can't tell it beat for beat.
So what can I tell?
Where are the cool turns, the twists and
turns that say this is going to be
a really great project or this is going
to be a great movie or great TV show.
And then and then it's like we used to go
into the rooms and you would go in

(01:03:05):
and there would be an early meeting to be
one or two executives.
And then later in the meeting, you'd have
a whole boardroom full of people
and you'd pitch it out and it was all
verbal, you know, and
a lot of times they'd
go, thank you very much.
And other times they'd go, that's great.
Let's do that. And be like,
yeah, we're like partying.

(01:03:26):
I mean, that's that's how
that's how it went down.
You know, and and then
it would covid came in.
People started emerging to like, well,
let's pitch on Zoom.
And now it's all Zoom.
I mean, I've got I went into a Marvel
meeting because it was like I had gone
on like six meetings with those guys and
then we they said, well, let's just do a
sit down, come in the
media. So I went did that.

(01:03:47):
And then I think I had another one with
someone else, like Dick Wolf,
I think I did a meeting where we had done
like two or three development meetings
and went in and had a sit down with them.
But mostly, most of these
meetings, guys are now all Zoom.
And it's the same thing, except you also
have like a visual
element you can use now.
You know, as you're as you're pitching,

(01:04:07):
there's like images
that come and fade in,
fade out like there's a
picture of my main actor.
There's a movie star.
You know, Ryan is going
to play the lead here.
And it's like, and then you have
whatever, whatever you've seen decks.
They're called decks.
So that's
and it's like it's not as personal, but
you can get a lot more done strangely,

(01:04:29):
if that makes sense.
And so, Patrick, just so I'm aware,
you're playing and kind of
you're kind of showing
this deck on the Zoom.
So in a way, you're doing like a
PowerPoint presentation,
power presentation and
you're being an actor.
You sort of have to act it out to, you
know, you've got to.
Oh, like when I first started pitching,
I'm like, what is this bullshit?

(01:04:50):
I'm a writer. I don't have to go.
I don't want to act.
I'm getting out of that game.
You know, no, you've got to act, man.
You've got to be like, you've got to
you've got to have a performance on.
It's not like you're
just reading your shit.
The old days, you didn't have
your script in front of you.
You couldn't read something.
You had like pitch it like sit there and
go, OK, so the guy walks into the room
and, you know, machine guns go off,
they're stuck blasting
away to the next thing.

(01:05:11):
You know, you know, it's
like and that's how it went.
Now it's you read, you read through it,
but you got to perform it.
You got to script, you know, I was
actually going to say that your acting
background actually probably helped you
be able to pitch because a lot of writers
are even more shy, more introverted and
aren't used to verbalizing their stories.

(01:05:31):
That's right.
And, you know, so I'm
working with a couple
of young writers on a project right now
of Universal TV and they're great,
but they're young man and they and it's
like you've got to coach them up.
I have this pair of young female writers
that are both these great young ladies
that are working on this big
international show that
I'm helping them with.
And, you know, we I every time they want

(01:05:54):
to run the document by me,
I make a picture to me on Zoom and every
time they've gotten better.
So it's just like anything else.
You got to practice it.
You got to be a hustle.
It's part of your job,
like we're in the sand.
It's like it's all it's
everything is the thing.
It's not one thing.
You know, I just saw a video recently and
I just thought it was fitting.

(01:06:16):
Surprisingly, it was
actually Owen Wilson.
He was talking about auditioning and he
said that sometimes the most talented
actors ever just can't
audition and it's a shame.
And sometimes very similarly, the most
talented writers ever
can't pitch and they
can't get their stories made.
So there you go.
I can totally believe that to be true.

(01:06:38):
And I can tell you that,
you know, John and I are
really good at the pitching part.
We're really good at the right document,
really created, bringing the performance
about being engaged in the
Q&A. It's part of the job.
If you're going to be a writer, part of
the job is learning how to pitch on Zoom,
do the work, get better at

(01:06:59):
it, take an acting class.
If you're shy, overcome it because what
he's talking about is true.
And similarly, there are actors I talk to
who get resentful of the idea that they
have to be business people as well, they
have to do all this marketing stuff on
the side. But that's the thing that
allows you to do the thing that you love.
So you've got to get good at that, too.
It's just all part of the package.
A lot of actors don't even want to do

(01:07:19):
self tapes or resent the fact that they
have to do self tapes.
But that's not the reality.
You know, it's understandable.
Like, why do I have to do this bullshit?
But that's and that's how I thought is
when I first started writing, I thought,
well, I was just going to write specs and
then you got to go pitch this.
I'm like, how do I do?
And then learn.
But you have to accept it like we are

(01:07:39):
saying, accept it as part of the reality
that you're in. And that's the only way
you're going to be good at it.
If you go in there resentful with a chip
on your shoulder or whatever.
Fucking people are going to know, man,
they're going to be like, oh, I got to be
here. And I've been in tissues listening
to other people pitch.
I was like, that person
did not want to be here.
Getting to the final stretch here, do you
want to talk about how that story of

(01:08:01):
Gold happened and how it all came to be?
McConaughey's story.
Yeah, Gold is a was one of my favorite
scripts that John and I wrote.
And, you know, it's a really
good lesson in patience because
I saw this little documentary, I think it
was called Masterminds.
It's like a half it was a half an hour
cheesy kind of documentary on

(01:08:23):
little crimes that will go on around the
world, little capers
and heists and stuff.
And there was a story about this guy
named David Walsh who had, you know, done
the story basically. It was a true story.
So I watched it.
Well, that's a that's three acts.
That's a great movie. That's super great.
So I called John.
My partner said, watch this little
documentary, see if you

(01:08:44):
can find it and watch it.
And he did. And he goes, you're right.
This is great. So we put together like a
pitch, probably like a
you know, 20, 30 minute pitch.
And we took it to our agents and they
were like, this is great.
So we went around and we pitched it
probably 20, 30 places.
I mean, really just paper because
everybody really believed in it.

(01:09:04):
But everybody said, great pitch.
You know, this could be a really good
movie, but it's execution oriented.
And if you guys want to, you know, move
this thing forward, you're going to have
to write it. So we did.
But we started writing it based on the
very detailed outline.
We started writing it
and about six months in,

(01:09:27):
you were about halfway through because
you had the outline and the first draft
and going back and forth
and other things came up.
We just we just we had we got we got busy
on a gig and we had to leave.
We were going to go go shoot in Chicago
for six months or something.
And and we had to put it down.
We just had too much going on.
We couldn't together
concentrate on what we needed to do.

(01:09:48):
So we waited. Then we
never got back for probably
I don't know, year and a half, two years.
And we finally said, I think one I think
one day one of us just goes, hey,
what about what about finishing gold?
So we're like, OK, let's do it.
We finished gold. We wrote the script.
And then again, it's this up and down
roller coaster experience.
Right. We're really happy.

(01:10:09):
We think it's fucking great.
We send it to our agents and they just
like they don't respond.
They literally don't have any.
Finally, we're trying
to get them on the phone.
We're trying to get them on the phone
like weeks and weeks have gone by now.
And. Everyone's just like, yeah, you
know, it's whatever.
It's it's fine.
And then a manager,

(01:10:31):
one of our managers at
industry, Michael Bataille goes to work
and he just papers it back
to the right producers and he gets into a
vote and it makes it on the blacklist.
Now it's hot, man.
It's like everybody's into it.
CIA is into it.
We've got this big people making offers.
And finally, Teddy Schwarzman, who we

(01:10:52):
really thought was just a cool guy,
because we had met with him and really
liked how Teddy was seeing
as a producer, was envisioning the movie.
So we went with Teddy and then took it.
Even and even though we had money to pay
an actor, it still took.
I think it still took two
years to get an actor on board.

(01:11:13):
It just gets so hard.
Get it. So because
everybody is good is booked.
And if you're not booked, then there's a
reason, you know, so it's
there's a really small market for those
name guys that could really bring it.
And we got Steve Gagan to direct who we
love from traffic and Siriana.
I mean, he had just really
done a lot of great ones.
Some Academy Awards.
And Steve is a super cool guy.

(01:11:35):
And and then we got we talked to Matthew
and Matthew had this
incredible vision for the role.
He felt a really strong
connection to the material.
Said it was the best
script he'd ever read.
I think that's even on YouTube somewhere.
And he said it was because it was so
close to his father.

(01:11:56):
That reminded him of his dad.
He wanted he wanted to
play this role for his dad.
He wanted to bring him to life.
Now, it was a bit of a
shock, I think, for everybody.
When he came out of the trailer one day
and he had changed his teeth
and his hair and put on this weight.
It wasn't like sex
symbol, Matthew Bugane anymore.
But man, his performance is so good.
It's so committed and so powerful.

(01:12:18):
And, you know, I don't think it got the
credit that it deserved.
I'm sure most writers feel that way.
But if you haven't seen it, go watch it.
It's a really good ride.
I haven't had anybody
tell me, except my dad.
Everybody else has done before.
Before we move on, so
that's around 10 years ago.
Is like is it uncommon to
have to write a spec script now?

(01:12:39):
Would are people writing more spec
scripts now or less with
the way that entertainment has changed?
Oh, my God, it's like
it's changing every week.
It seems like, oh, we want specs.
We don't want specs.
We're looking for this.
Or, you know, we don't
want we don't want procedural.
We want to do all we want is procedural.
It's like you really
like what I've learned is.

(01:13:03):
It changes so much and so fast.
Writing is writing fast.
I mean, writing slow
rather business is fast.
So you got to write what
you like and eventually
your writing will become popular again.
Can't go wrong.
Just stick with what you're doing.
Ignore the trends and you'll be fine.
Yeah.
The time you finish writing, you're going

(01:13:25):
to be the trends will be changed.
And you'll be like, it's like fashion
because we're waiting
on baited breath here.
We have to hear what is
this Michael Mann story?
Ah, really a great story.
Look, I love Michael Mann
and respect him immensely.
He's like one of the great, you know.
Just like one of the great filmmakers.

(01:13:45):
We were doing a project with him and we
were sort of collaborating on something.
And the collaboration was great.
You know, we're it was very egalitarian.
We'd be for breakfast over in Brentwood
and we were working on the scripts and
going back to like what we were talking
about last week or last time was about
risk taking and about how you what you
have to do to roll the
dice to get things made.

(01:14:05):
And there was this place in the world
that was very, very dangerous to go to.
And he wanted me to go there
with him and do a research trip.
And I, by, you know, reps and kind of
investigated and they're like,
we've got to get all these shots.
Okay.
So we got the shots and the next thing
you know, he's like,
okay, now I get in there.
Call from Asian.
We got getting ready to leave in a week

(01:14:26):
to go on this research trip.
This very dangerous place.
And there's a big
movie star attached to it.
And he wants to get it researched so we
can start writing it.
And then I get a call from my agency.
You know what?
There's a, there's a thing from the US
council that's saying, you know,
Americans shouldn't travel there.
Like what the fuck are you talking about?
We shouldn't, it's like, there's no,
there's a warning that they're killing

(01:14:47):
and kidnapping
Americans, you shouldn't go.
So we confront Michael about that.
And he's like, well, we'll
get some security guards.
When we should we get down
there, we'll hire some guys.
I'm like, what do you
need to hire some guys?
What do you need to hire?
So there's disease, there's infection,
there's malaria, there's like
kidnapping and there's assassination.
Go on a research trip

(01:15:08):
for a fucking movie.
I do admire that we'll see when we get
there kind of attitude as well.
We were like, we got to get out of this
because we don't want to die.
It's not that important.
And besides that, we, you know, we were
in an overall deal at Fox.
So we, so my agents go back to Mike, say,
look, these guys, they did the shots.
They're ready to go.
They really want to
do this with you, man.

(01:15:29):
But maybe they're going to have to, we're
going to have to go away at different
time to do the research because they're in this overall deal.
And about literally three hours later, we
get a call from the studio saying that
Michael Mann has called the head of the
studio and is trying to get you out of
your overall deal so you can travel to
this road, to this street.

(01:15:51):
Tell him not to.
He's doing you a favor, right?
Talked about that.
And I mean, he's just, he was just
fucking mad and he was going for it.
And of course that didn't
work, but I just admire that.
So much, man, that he would try to, I
think Dana Walden was like the head of
the Fox at the time.
She was like yourself, you know, you're

(01:16:12):
not taking my guys, you know?
So anyway, so it was great.
Great times.
Good, really great.
You know, just being around him and his
energy and his creativity.
And if you haven't seen a Michael Mann
movie recently, go watch them.
I think they're all, there's all, they
all have something to
offer, but some of them
are just really like heat, collateral.
I think those are just amazing movies.

(01:16:33):
Did you know Ikan was in
collateral as an extra?
Excuse me, that's background artist.
Background artist.
Way to go, man.
Talked about this at another time, but
one of my first
background jobs was standing
next to Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx in the
Korean nightclub scene.
And it was long hours.

(01:16:55):
We got paid a lot of money.
Michael Mann was paying a higher amount
for real Asians in this nightclub.
He was not scared to
blow through the money.
We had long hours and I was shooting on
that for weeks and it was great.
But anyway, that was the movie.
That was the movie.
I had fun to hang out with those guys.
I mean, there's so much, you know, Jamie

(01:17:16):
Foxx, I worked with
him on a, you know, on a
show and his company, Foxhole.
And I and I've always just thought Tom
Cruise is probably in my lifetime, our
lifetimes in our career is probably the
most important actor of our industry
because he just generates so much money.

(01:17:37):
And I think after COVID, even when people
were still afraid to go back into the
theaters, I think he single handedly
created a movement
towards back into theaters by
doing that really cool announcement at
the beginning of Top Gun.
You know, I'll just say this, but I think that's the reason why I think
of this, maybe even like a hidden one of
my hidden gems is like, if you haven't
seen, you know, Miami
Vice is a wildly underrated.

(01:17:58):
It's a fun,
beautifully shot music, romantic.
I mean, it's I love the
movie version of Miami Vice.
I think Colin Farrell got a
got sober after that movie.
I think that was his last
movie before getting sober.
As far as I know, I could be wrong about
that, but I think
I've read that somewhere.
I wonder if there's
anything to do with it.

(01:18:19):
So that's it.
That's my Michael Mann story.
So Patrick, what if there's any projects
that you feel like you can share?
Oh, thank you. Well, you know, John and I
have this project with Mark Gordon,
Larry's brother, I believe.

(01:18:40):
And Mark Scott, the Criminal Mind shows
on and he's really
there's a great producer
over there with Mark Bibby, Bibby Dunn.
She's amazing.
And so they brought us a series of books
and it's a it's a
procedural and it's based
on a young game warden
set in the wilds of Maine.

(01:19:02):
And it's just like this incredibly cool
setting with amazingly different kinds of
bad guys and criminals.
And it's based on a series of books.
And these books are just
they're rich and they're powerful.
They're written by Paul Warren.
And it's really, you know, it's hard to
find a fresh take at
the procedural, a fresh
run at the character, a fresh run at the
environment, different kinds of crimes.

(01:19:24):
The way guys unravel
things, it's just hard.
I mean, you can get like
the standard kind of good.
There's a lot of good stuff out there,
but trying to find
something really unique
is hard. And when and when Mark's company
brought us this, we thought this is so
great and so fresh.
And it just feels like it's it's like
people look at people
who love crime, which is

(01:19:44):
almost everybody who
love the freshness of this.
It's got kind of a kind of a true
detective vibe to it, but
it's also a young guy just
starting out.
It's also it's also got
16 books attached to it.
So this is an ongoing thing.
And I just love everybody involved.
And Paul, the guy who
wrote the books, it's great.
And Lionsgate is is the studio and

(01:20:06):
they're amazing and
they're they're behind it and
they love it. And yeah, we're going to go
pitching that pretty soon.
And I'm pretty excited.
I love it. It's amazing.
That sounds awesome.
Also, one more coincidental thing that I
just wanted to mention on the podcast.
So you can and I, as you may know, met at
an acting class at
Leslie Kahn, which is an
acting school here in Hollywood.

(01:20:27):
And then I found out two weeks ago that
you and Leslie Kahn
had worked together on an
episode of Quantum Leap, which
is why you did something else.
No, no, no.
Yeah. Surprise.
She's actually on the
podcast with us right now.
Oh, please.
That was another another coincidence.

(01:20:49):
So like it's funny that all of our paths
had crossed before we
ever knew each other.
Like I met you in 20.
You know, I marked
Cross Path as you in 2011.
You know, that was the
Quantum Leap was in the late 80s.
Like it's funny that
like here we all are now.
And we all kind of came
across each other in some way.
And some weird connected way.

(01:21:10):
Which speaks to something of our
industry, which is that
it's small, you know, it's not
a lot of people here doing
this, you know, it's hard.
We love it.
It's going through a lot of growing pains
and changes and difficult shit.
But it's still what we do and we love.
And regardless of what technology where
technology is taking

(01:21:31):
us, we have to be able to
still tell the human story because the
AIs are going to be
able to tell stories, but
they're not going to be
telling human stories.
They're going to be telling AIs stories,
you know, because AIs
isn't something else.
It is absolutely like us.
This is the first time in human history

(01:21:52):
that we've had to
share the planet with an
intelligent being that's equal to or
greater than ourselves.
And that's artificial intelligence.
It's going to do a lot of different
things, good things, bad things, great.
Who knows?
You have to adapt to adapt to what's new
and tell a new story
in a way that no one's
ever done it and try to find or try to
find our relevance again.

(01:22:12):
You know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a great place to pin it.
Great place to end it.
Patrick, thank you again for your time.
Yeah, man.
I just want to share my hidden gem.
Oh, yeah.
Let's do a hidden gem.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
We didn't want to put it
on you, but yeah, go for it.
No, I just real quickly.

(01:22:33):
Two things.
One is I had a back problem.
I was supposed to get surgery.
I couldn't get
surgery for like six weeks.
I started researching infrared somas and
I got one and I
canceled my surgery because
in six weeks, all the pain has gone away.
Wow.
I don't know if that's the same.
I'm not.

(01:23:03):
and the blood flow, that infrared,
not the traditional solace
can create, changed my life.
And I'm so grateful for that.
And I just bought one for a couple of,
they're expensive, it's a
couple of thousand dollars,
put it in my house, and I just do it,
but I do it religiously.
I do it like it's part of
my routine in the morning,
it's also part of my routine at night.

(01:23:24):
But in six weeks, I'd gone from thinking
that I'm gonna have to
be on serious medication
and be one of those guys that's just
gonna shuffle around
and not be able to lift up my grandkids
for the rest of my life.
And I was just trying to adapt the idea
that I was gonna be a guy
that lives in chronic pain.
The thing that saved my
life was an infrared sauna,

(01:23:45):
and I can't explain it.
I just can't go
beyond, whatever you look up
on the internet and the
Google machine about it,
it's gonna give you the information
that I just kind of spewed off.
But it might work for you, it might not.
It worked for me, and it certainly
couldn't hurt anybody.
So that's my sort of thing.
And then the last
little bit, a piece of music,
it's called, everybody knows this album.

(01:24:07):
Miles Davis is kind of blue.
Love that album.
This is obviously vinyl.
Now, the fourth song,
first song on the second side,
that's where the thing is, yeah,
it's called "Flamico Sketches."
And in there, there are four solos.

(01:24:30):
Well, four soloists, five solos.
The first is Miles
Davis, the second is Coltrane,
and the third is John
Cannonball Adderley.
And John Cannonball
Adderley is the greatest, to me,
most beautiful,
sensuous, gorgeous saxophone solo

(01:24:50):
ever played.
Wow.
And if you listen for it,
because you can feel it's all improvised.
So he only did it one time.
In the history of the
planet, even if he tried to,
I don't think he could do it again.
Nobody writes down the notes of
improvised jazz, generally.
So he's playing, it
feels like it's in chaos.
It feels like all of our lives.
It's a little

(01:25:10):
disturbing, it's a little chaotic,
it's beautiful, but it's
like, there's no structure to it.
It's just this beautiful improvised flow.
And out of all this
non-structure comes this riff
that's beautifully put
together and organized in a way
that just makes you feel like
everything's gonna be okay.
And then it goes away again,

(01:25:32):
like just kind of like a
butterfly drifting off.
And it's my favorite piece
of music on the entire planet.
That one, that solo on that
song, on that album from 1959,
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue."
That's it. Wow.
I love that, that's a great hidden gem.
I don't think we can compare to yours,

(01:25:52):
but we'll at least throw a
couple out while we're here.
Yeah. No, that's great.
My hidden gem was
actually, you told me about it.
It was, it's Rick Rubin's
book, "The Creative Act,"
which Patrick actually recommended to me,
which is not super hidden.
I've been listening to it too.
Yeah, it's actually
the audio book is great
because Rick Rubin narrates it.
But for anybody who's creative,

(01:26:12):
it just, or wants to be creative,
it just describes creativity in a way
I've never heard before.
And Patrick was the person
who actually turned me onto it.
And it isn't, I'd
recommend it to anybody to kind of,
just gives us such a great
description of creativity.
Yeah, the part of
creativity is so hard to describe.
He does, he manages to do that.

(01:26:33):
And what it makes you do is
it makes you feel very honored
and proud and grateful to be
a part of the creative world
in a way that it just connects you
to like the whole process
with everybody, not just,
you suddenly don't feel so alone
when you were listening to
this book for some reason.
It's really amazing.
We were joking around
about starting a cooking show.

(01:26:54):
I'm not going, I can't
top your guys' creative
hidden gems here, but I'm not
sure if you heard of durian.
Do you know the fruit durian?
No. Okay.
This is, I'm so glad to bring this up.
What is it?
I'm a fruit nut.
I mean, I love it. I know.
It's a tropical fruit
and this is so Asian.
So I'm so glad to bring it up here.

(01:27:14):
My mom just started raving about it.
It's a tropical fruit.
The reason why people know it is the
smell is so pungent.
A lot of Americans can't stand it.
Why one of them?
The smell is so
strong, it'll blow your mind.
What is it?
Is it like farts or
what does it smell like?
Is it orange, kind of spiky?

(01:27:36):
Kind of looks like a pineapple,
but a little spiky on the outside.
Anyway, it is incredibly
healthy, tons of magnesium in it,
and it's actually a lot of
health and nutrients in it.
It doesn't taste like it smells though.
The smell looks sounds awful.
I'm just reading about it here.
The smell is so strong,
I don't even know what
it really tastes like.

(01:27:56):
(laughing)
I have to, and I'm
gonna give it a second try
because my mom told me to eat it
and she's gonna get some more.
I literally have to
plug my nose to eat it,
but it is very healthy for you.
Anyway, if you're
intrigued, go get some durian.
And yeah, that's my hidden gem.
I'm gonna try it.
I told you, Rian, I told you,
we're gonna start a cooking show.
We're gonna start a cooking show.

(01:28:17):
This sounds like a dare.
(laughing)
Exactly, exactly, I dare you guys.
Patrick Masset, thank
you so much for your time.
And this has been a
real treat, thank you.
Well, it's really been
an honor and a pleasure
to be with you guys.
You guys are the fucking coolest
and I really had a great time.
And thank you for
letting me be a part of it.
I just hope that this
show goes on forever
and you guys just become,

(01:28:38):
get all your dreams come true, man.
Appreciate it, thank you.
So grateful, thank you, thank you, man.
I really, I've loved this chat.
Love you guys.

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Patrick Masset Pt. 2 - The Writing Process, How to Pitch, and Life and Death with Michael Mann | Ep 39

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Patrick Masset Pt. 2 - The Writing Process, How to Pitch, and Life and Death with Michael Mann | Ep 39