I’ve worked with Jack Warner and Jimmy Stewart – and Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp twice. I’ve had dinners with Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.
Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other’s micro-expressions.
People love to be swept off their feet, to go into an environment where they’ve never been, to experience things they only dream about. And filmmaking offers that potential.
Being true to yourself involves showing and sharing emotion. The spirit that motivates most great storytellers is ‘I want you to feel what I feel,’ and the effective narrative is designed to make this happen. That’s how the information is bound to the experience and rendered unforgettable.
Every journey that is successful has culs-de-sac and speed bumps. I carry a wisdom gene through my life through the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there’s the opportunity seeds of great success. They’re not miles apart. So if they’re that close together, and if you’re really working, you’re always gonna have that likelihood that something’s not going to work.
There are no rules, but you break them at your peril.
Miss the audience’s heart as a filmmaker, and the only wallet that gets hit will be your own. That’s because the heart is always the first target in story telling.
Use state-of-the-heart technology online and offline to turn listeners into viral advocates and customers into raving fans.
The portal into people’s hearts is being interested in them.
Stories aren’t the icing on the cake; they are the cake!
A German shepherd dog could walk in the office with a script in his mouth, and if that script was really good, they’d buy the script.
The arts tend to be more liberal. There tends to be more social relevance in the arts.
Social cohesion was built into language long before Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter – we’re tribal by nature. Tribes today aren’t the same as tribes thousand of years ago: It isn’t just religious tribes or ethnic tribes now: It’s sports fans, it’s communities, it’s geography.
Are you motivated? Are you coherent? Is your intention aligned? Are your feet, tongue, heart and wallet congruent? That intention shines through.
At Casablanca we did ‘Midnight Express,’ ‘Flashdance,’ and ‘The Deep.’ My willingness for risk has always been my strength.
In today’s roller-coaster economy, hyper-competitive, fear-based, flat and global world, convincing anyone to do anything at any time requires getting their attention, creating their intention and turning it to action.
The Internet is an audience of one, a million times over.
Most young people haven’t used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.
Tales of perfection fail dramatically because they never ring true. But when a leader uses authentic drama to reveal the hidden truth about a problem his business is facing, he guides the audience to feel as if they are uncovering the truth themselves. Compelling drama convinced listeners that the teller had heart.