Today, I want to talk about writing strong themes, because there’s a lot of misunderstanding around the concept of theme (which is why I wrote the book Writing Your Story’s Theme). When we think of theme, we often think of a one-word or short phrase aphorism. For example, maybe the theme of the story is “love” or maybe it’s “overcoming a sense of unworthiness” or something like that. While that is very possibly what the story is about and what the theme is pointing to, that isn’t necessarily a good roadmap for helping you learn how to write strong themes. It’s valuable to look a little deeper and to understand how theme actually operates within a story, what its function is, and therefore how you can use the other elements of your story to consciously create the theme you want to create.

Can You Write Strong Themes “On Purpose”?

In the past, a common statement that has floated around the writing community is that “writers should never consciously write the theme.” There is some truth to this (which I’ll talk about in just a second), but ultimately, I adamantly disagree with this idea.

What this is really pointing to is the truth that writers never want to preach at their readers. You don’t want to try to start with some message you’re trying to share about the world and then shoehorn that into your characters’ mouths or their perspectives of the world and try to prove it through whatever is happening in the story. You don’t want to come into a story to prove, for example, some political statement. Readers don’t want that. It doesn’t work within the story because it isn’t organic or it doesn’t flow. It feels, even if the author isn’t actually preaching at you, that they’re trying to jam some specific moral message into a story that doesn’t fit.

However, I think this unfortunate effect most often happens simply because the writer has an idea of theme but doesn’t understand how it actually works within storyform. If you do understand how theme operates, you’re much less likely to end up with fragmented themes, in which your story is saying one thing while you’re trying to say something else with the theme. Likewise, you can also avoid the problem of getting to the end and realizing what you thought was your story’s theme doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what’s actually happening.

In either case, you can end up having either stories that seem very disjointed, or even two different endings that are trying to individually address the plot and the theme. This creates a story that doesn’t feel cohesive and resonant.

However, if you understand what you’re doing and how story creates them, then you can accomplish two things.

1. You can consciously create anything you want to create within the realm of your story.

2. Perhaps most importantly, you can double-check and troubleshoot what isn’t working. If you get to the end of the story and you feel your theme is off the rails or nonexistent, you can go back and check what happened by asking, “Where do I need to work with the story in order to make the theme more powerful and pertinent?”

What Is Theme, Really?

The most important thing to understand about theme is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not its own thing within the story. It’s part of the greater whole. Specifically, it forms what I call “the trifecta” of plot, character, and theme. These three elements of story create each other; they do not exist by themselves in isolation. One necessarily creates the other.

We sometimes hear the idea of plot versus character, as if they were two totally separate things, when really they can’t be. The plot has to create the character, the character has to create the plot. Theme is the third part of that.

Here’s the thing: if you have a functional story that’s working, what that means is that all three of those things—plot, character, and theme—are working. Even if you’re not conscious of theme—even if you didn’t do it on purpose, so to speak—if all three are in cohesion with one another, that’s what you want. If you can bring consciousness to your administration of theme, then you can do it on purpose.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you come up with an idea for a plot. Necessarily, there must be characters in that plot. Although it may take a little time, as you flesh out that plot in your mind, you will begin to understand what kind of people are driving this plot. What kind of people are interested in going to the places and achieving the things that you want to see happen in this plot?

This works in reverse as well. If you start with an idea for a character, obviously you don’t have anything for them to do until there’s a plot. So pretty soon you start getting ideas for what these characters will do. What are they interested in? How are they interacting with other people? What do they want? What are they moving toward? Suddenly, you have a plot. Plot and character are not separate. One necessarily creates and brings with it the other.

The same is true of theme.

How Plot and Character Arc Create Theme

The interaction between plot and character is the engine that creates theme. We talked about in the last video about the Lie the Character Believes and how that creates this entire arc of the character’s evolution as they change their perspective, as they evolve into a new way of being and a new identity within the world. That’s character arc. And this new understanding of the world is something that has to be acted upon. It’s not just something happening in the character’s head. Otherwise, there’s no reason for the change to happen within the plot. It will be just an expression of philosophy, not a story. You have to bring this change of perspective into the action of the plot. Show what the character is going through, dramatize it through the events of the plot.

The events of the plot and the arrival of the conflict prompts the need for this change within the character. And then the change inside the character also allows them to evolve and grow what they’re doing in the external plot. If they remained the same, then either they wouldn’t be motivated to go on this story’s adventure at all or, depending on the type of story, the events of the plot will destroy them. They’ve got to evolve in order to survive. They’ve got to evolve in order to reach this next level of whatever it is the story wants them to achieve, whether that’s a relationship or a new job or saving the world or whatever the case may be. Some quiet literary stories really are just about changing that inner landscape. Whatever the case, this change must be proven in some way. It must be acted out within the plot.

Using Your Plot as a Thematic Metaphor

I like to think of the plot as a metaphor for whatever the character is changing internally, for the story’s Lie and Truth. Let’s say you start with the character’s Lie and Truth. And from there, you ask yourself what can the character do physically in the world that would dramatize and show this inner transformation from Lie to Truth.

An easy example of this would be The Hunger Games, in which the protagonist Katniss Everdeen follows a Flat Arc. This means she doesn’t change her perspective; she doesn’t grow from Lie to Truth. Instead, she uses her understanding of the Truth to change the world around her. In this case, that Truth would be her understanding that “oppression is no good,” that this Lie that has been fed to her country Panem by its oppressive government is that “their control is necessary to protect them” and the brutality of the Hunger Games is also necessary. Katniss begins her story understanding this is not true, as many people in her world do. What makes her an interesting character and protagonist is that her story gives her the opportunity to act on that Truth.

Specifically in this story, we can see how the entire premise of the Hunger Games—the entire scope of the plot in this story—is a very specific dramatization of her story’s Lie and Truth that allows her to go out and actively battle this oppression. She’s basically put in a cage and has to fight her way out. That’s a very explicit example of how your plot can operate as a thematic metaphor.

When you’ve got plot and character working together beautifully, we might say one is proving the other. From this, we get a theme. Even if you try to paste on a different kind of a theme, the events of your story and how your character responds to them and interacts with them is what inevitably creates the theme. That is the point of your story; that is the message of your story. The thematic Truth that will be proved by the end of your story is whatever is shown by the events of the story. Whatever is effective in your story is your story’s Truth. This can be something very practical such as a skill, but it can also be just an effective perspective that the characters hold of themselves or the world (e.g., self-worth).

Using Plot and Characters to Identify Your Story’s Theme

When you approach a story from the idea that plot, theme, and character are all equal members of the equation and that necessarily one creates the other, it allows you to make sure you’re creating a cohesive cycle. And also, when you’re running into problems, it allows you to stop and check.

Let’s say you’re having problems with your theme. “I don’t know what my theme is.”

Look at your character’s arc and specifically at the Lie the Character Believes. Look at what they need to overcome by the time they get to the end of the story and therefore what Truth they’re moving toward. That Truth is usually a very specific and easy way to sum up your story’s theme.

You can also look at the events of the plot.

• What are the characters doing?
• What is happening?
• What is challenging them?
• Where do they fail?
• What do they have to do to succeed?
• How do they have to change in order to become someone who can succeed in gaining the plot goal within your story?

This is where you can start looking for a theme and vice versa.

Using Theme to Create Your Plot and Character Arcs

Let’s say you start out knowing you want to write a story about “love conquers all”—that’s your theme, that’s what you want to write about. There’s no reason you can’t start with just that. Now you have a map for determining what kind of characters and what kind of character arc will help exemplify this.

• How will they be challenged to grow into this?
• What Lie might oppose this idea?
• What events of the plot will be an interesting way to explore all aspects of this idea?

Deepen Your Themes With the Thematic Square

This is where it can be really helpful to bring in a technique that Robert McKee wrote about in his book Story, which he called the Thematic Square. Start by examining your story’s thematic Truth from multiple perspectives. This prevents it from being just this simple black-and-white approach, i.e., “this is the wrong way to do it, and this is the right way to do it.” That approach is simplistic and can be on the nose and ultimately unconvincing to readers because that’s not really how it works for most of us most of the time in real life. If it was that simple, we’d always think, Ah, truth. I want to do that.  I pick that one because obviously it’s better. It’s obviously going to be more effective and help me get what I want, what I need, and what’s good for me.

But it’s not that simple, right?

There are many shades and complexities to this evolution of perspective because the Lie and the Truth are actually never black and white. Rather, they represent an evolution along the spectrum, from a limited perspective to a broader perspective. Ideally, you want to be able to explore the complexities around this idea.

The Four Corners of the Thematic Square

You can do this, via McKee’s Thematic Square, by creating a square with four corners that represent four different sides or points of the thematic premise you’re exploring.

The Positive Thematic Statement

First and foremost, you have the Positive corner. Positive represents the story’s Truth. This is the good stuff you’re trying to posit in your story, i.e, “this is the way we should be”—whether the character embraces it and succeeds or fails to embrace it and fails within the story. This is the positive Truth you are suggesting is the best way for the characters to behave in this story. Examples of this would be Respect or Love. These are good qualities. These are things that we recognize as something we want to to embody in our lives, because they will help us to be more effective in whatever we’re doing.

The Contradictory Thematic Statement

Opposite that is the Contradictory corner. This represents something that is directly contradictory to the story’s positive Truth. At its simplest, this is the Lie. This is what stands opposed to the story’s Truth. In simple one-word explanations of what these might be, we have in opposition to Respect, Disrespect. In opposition to Love, we have Hate.

The Contrary Thematic Statement

Those two are obvious; they’re an obvious polarity. From there, you can start moving down to the bottom corners of your square and think about, first of all, what would be an element within this thematic exploration that would be Contrary to the Positive.

The word contrary always makes me think of somebody who’s being contrary: they’re just being annoying. They’re just being stubborn and refusing to see things. It’s not necessarily that they represent or are directly opposed to the argument, but they’re just refusing to do it. They’re opting out, saying, “talk to the hand,” as we used to say. The Contrary perspective wants to bypass the whole thematic argument. In some ways, this makes it more dangerous than the contradictory aspect, which at least is looking at the Truth—looking it in the eye and doing battle with it. In contrast, the Contrary aspect just wants to skip it. It doesn’t even want to engage with this Truth.

An example of this for a theme of Respect, could be Rudeness. Rudeness is passive-aggressive. “I don’t respect you, but I’m not actually doing you the service of coming to your face and telling you that either.” For Love, the Contrary aspect could be Indifference, which in many ways can be more painful than Hate in some relationships. We often say love is hate flipped on its head, with the idea being that if you can dig down there in the hate, you might be able to find love in the shadow and integrate it. Indifference, however, says, “I don’t care about you. You don’t exist to me. You’re dead to me. I don’t think about you at all.” And this can be more painful and certainly more difficult to move through toward that more positive Truth.

The Negated Thematic Statement

Finally, we have what McKee calls the Negation of the Negation. This is the  Lie taken to its farthest extreme. It’s taken to such an extreme that it’s as if the Truth doesn’t exist. It rewrites reality. Over the course of the story, a Negation character will be given an opportunity to see the Truth and how it could potentially positively impact their life. But for whatever reason, they reject it and end up in a worse place than when they just believed the Lie or the Contradictory aspect.

In our example of Respect, the Negation of the Negation would be Self-Disrespect. Usually, even if someone disrespects someone else, there’s that place within their own ego where they are still standing within their own sense of identity and pride of self in opposition to something else. However, with Self-Disrespect, they can’t even respect themselves. If there isn’t even that ego container to hold their own identity, that is, in many ways, a worse place to be than if you’re just this egoic person disrespecting everybody else. It’s an almost plague-like effect. The seed of the Lie takes over the person’s entire being and life and perhaps beyond depending on the type of story you’re telling. The example McKee uses as the Negation of Love is Self-Hatred. Again, the Negation sees the character moving into a place where love doesn’t even exist in their universe.

How to Implement the Thematic Square in Your Story

One of the best ways to explore the Thematic Square is to have your protagonist represent any one of the thematic corners with the antagonistic force representing the polar opposite. Depending on whether you’re telling a Positive Change Arc, a Flat Arc, or a Negative Change Arc, your protagonist may or may not represent the Positive statement.

You can also use the Thematic Square to deepen this thematic complexity by looking for ways in which multiple characters—at least four characters—represent the different aspects of the square. This gives the protagonist a chance to interact with all of them, to be challenged by all of them, and to see the pros and the cons of each one so that they’re challenged. Their exploration of the theme will no longer be a simple binary choice between, “Oh, the Lie is bad and the Truth is better, so of course I’ll choose the Truth.” Rather, they have to move through all of these shadow aspects of the Lie and the Truth, to explore them, and to be challenged by them.

If your project uses characters to represent all four aspects, this also helps you develop and deepen the opportunities for your plot. Make sure every character’s actions, everything that’s happening, any opposition the protagonist faces from antagonistic forces is all thematically pertinent.

No thematic position in your story should be random. If the protagonist is trying to move toward a thematic Truth of “Love,” you don’t want another over here focusing on Freedom and Slavery. That’s a totally different theme. Of course, there can always be crossover—because ultimately everything is interconnected in real life. But applying the Thematic Square to your story can help you recognize which ideas don’t support the point of your story. If something doesn’t support the plot’s throughline and doesn’t support the protagonist’s individual arc, ask yourself how you could repurpose it so it informs the central theme.

Find Your Theme by Examining Your Story’s Ending

When thinking about how best to integrate theme into plot and character arc, look at how your story ends. The ending of your story—your Climactic Moment—will prove what your story was really about. This means it will prove what your theme is really about.

The decisions your characters make in the end, the perspectives they use to inform their choices and actions, as well as their ability to gain their plot goal—all of these things reveal your story’s theme. Examine the questions your story raises and the answers it ultimately ends up giving.

This does not mean that you need to end with some kind of moral of the story or with the mentor character coming out and giving a little speech about the lesson to be learned or something like that. Your story’s “answer” is simply whether or not the characters were effective and how they end up.

• Did they end in a better place physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally?
• Or is it a worse place?

If it’s a better place, then the story’s Truth (i.e., the “answer” to the questions that have been raised throughout the story), is “yes, this is an effective way of being in the world. This is a good course of action.”

If the characters fail, either ambiguously or definitively, then what the story is saying is “this is not a good way of being.” Such a story becomes, even without any need to create a moral of the story, a cautionary tale.

Find Your Theme by Examining Change and Consequence in Your Plot

Finally, think about how your story will develop change and consequence.

Change, both within your story’s character arcs and within the context of how your characters are able to enact change in the outer world of the story will prove what the story is really about. It will show you how your theme develops, what thematic questions are at play, and what answers the plot ultimately posits.

Specifically, think about consequences. Consequences aren’t always something negative. From a causal perspective, consequences can be something good. However, more often, consequences reveal a hard pill to swallow. Not only can consequences sometimes prove that “oops, the characters did not choose the best way of being. They did not choose the story’s Truth,” but consequences can also offer a resonant way to drive home that this path of change, this path of evolution that we’re all on within our lives, isn’t easy. It’s not cut and dried. It’s not black and white.

Again, if theme was simply “Lie versus truth—this is worse and this is better,” we’d always choose the right thing. There would be no need for stories because we’d always choose the right thing. Stories show us that there are, in fact, consequences even for choosing the right thing, for choosing what’s best for us, for choosing something we believe is in the best interest of ourselves and our communities and our world. Stories show us life isn’t simple, that there are always sacrifices, that letting go of a Lie or dealing with people who aren’t ready for us to let go of the Lie—it’s not easy. Embracing the Truth is often difficult.

Examining the consequences your characters face or could face if you deepen your story can be helpful in showing you not just your story’s theme, but how to deepen it and then explore all of the depth of it. Go into the shadows and explore the profundity of change. Ultimately, that’s what theme in story is about.

Admittedly, theme is an abstract concept. Zooming in and thinking of it in terms of plot and character makes it more concrete and easy to master within your story. Again, I’ve written a whole book about theme. So if you want more, you can check out Writing Your Story’s Theme.

Happy writing!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you think is the most challenging part of writing strong themes in your stories? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

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How can you balance creativity with business when it comes to writing — and filmmaking? How can you access that ‘touch of madness’ in everything you create? How can authors pitch their books for film? All this and more with Larry Kasanoff.

In the intro, Paid ads with BookBub, Facebook and Amazon [BookBub]; Blood Vintage cover reveal; Unter dem Zoo out now in German; The entire ARKANE Thriller series is back on Audible, as well as Spotify, and you can get 50% off at JFPennBooks.com (65+ hours of thrillers!).

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

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Larry Kasanoff is the CEO of Threshold Entertainment and has made over 200 films as a producer or studio head. Some of his credits include Mortal Kombat, True Lies, Terminator 2, Dirty Dancing, and Academy Award-Winning Best Picture, Platoon. He’s also worked in the music business with artists like Michael Jackson and The Rolling Stones.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Why are creatives more scared to express themselves now?
• Tips for starting out in the industry
• The timeline differences between getting a book published vs. a movie published
• How to state of play and positivity can help your creativity flow
• Balancing creative decisions with business decisions
• Tips for longevity in a creative career
• How to pitch as an introverted author
• Generative AI in the movie industry

You can find Larry at LarryKasanoff.com and his new book at ATouchOfTheMadness.com

Transcript of Interview with Larry Kasanoff

Joanna: Larry Kasanoff is the CEO of Threshold Entertainment and has made over 200 films as a producer or studio head. Some of his credits include Mortal Kombat, True Lies, Terminator 2, Dirty Dancing, and Academy Award-Winning Best Picture, Platoon.

He’s also worked in the music business with artists like Michael Jackson and The Rolling Stones, which is like, wow. He has a new book, which is A Touch of the Madness: How to Be More Innovative in Work and Life . . . by Being a Little Crazy. So welcome to the show, Larry.

Larry: Thank you. It’s really nice to be here.

Joanna: Oh, I’m so excited to talk to you. Let’s just start with a really obvious question. You are so successful in film and music videos—

Why write a book at this point in your career?

Larry: Well, there are two reasons. First of all, we had a year last year where there were strikes. The actor’s union struck and the writers’ union struck, so we couldn’t actually work, couldn’t make movies.

More than that, over the last few years, I’ve seen in a way I never have before, people, not only in my industry, but in every industry, scared to move on their creative ideas or their entrepreneurial ideas. I’ve never seen it like that.

What if it’s wrong? What if it fails? What if I get canceled? What if someone doesn’t like it?

I was whining to my brother one day about it, and he said, “Why don’t you do something about it? Write a book.” My brother’s a writer, and so I did.

It was really just to inspire people that that creative idea, that that nutso thing that your wife, husband, father, mother, daughter, boss will think it’s too nuts, that’s the one that you should embrace and go for it. So that was really my only purpose.

Joanna: We’ll come back to that, but—

Why do you think people are more scared now?

Is it that the environment is more difficult, or do you think something has changed, like, I don’t know, since the pandemic, like the personality of people?

Larry: In a way, it doesn’t matter why, but I mean, my opinion is the world ebbs and flows. We talk about how conservative political correctness was in the last five years. You know, after the Italian Renaissance, a few years later they covered up the Botticelli’s because it was a whole movement that they were too racy.

So this is just part of human nature, it just goes. I think this one is a little bit worse because social media and technology and communications means anything that happens gets broadcast immediately all over the world.

So I think it’s the political correctness that has instilled fear of speaking out in people.

Joanna: I mean, that is a challenge, and we’ll come back to some of these challenges. First of all, just the challenge for you in writing a book. You have written a lot of different mediums, screenplays and visual and audio things.

What were the challenges you faced in writing the book?

Larry: It was really fun because the book is really all stories that happened to me, which I used to illustrate my points on why you should embrace the madness and how to do it.

So honestly, once I decided to write it—these are stories I tell my assistants, and I torture everyone with—it only took me 10 days to write the whole book. So it was actually very lovely. It was fun.

I mean, I was just remembering things, and every now and then I would call on my brother and say, “Can I tell this story?” He goes, “No! That’s too much!” you know, if I was offensive. It was really a fun process.

Then when I was finished with the book, I called a friend and said, “I need a book agent. I know agent agents, but I don’t know book agents.” So he introduced me to a guy named Greg Reed. Greg introduced me to an agent named Bill Gladstone.

I mean, I had one call with Greg. I had one call with Bill, and we hit it off. Bill said, “I love it. Send me the book today.” That was a Monday, and on Tuesday he said, “I want to rep you.”

So we got on the phone with our publisher. He read the book by Wednesday, and by Friday, I had a signed deal. So the whole thing was really very lovely and fun and quick and easy, the writing of the book.

Joanna: I love this. I just want to point out to everyone listening, many people would be like, oh, that’s all right for him. I’m looking at your career, and a lot of people listening are just starting out.

The reason this was easy for you to get a book deal and an agent—and you know, we’ll come back to the writing—but you have worked for decades to get to a point in your life where people want to work with you, right?

Do you have any thoughts for people who are just starting out, in whatever industry?

Larry: Well, you know, first of all, everyone says that to me, “Oh, it must be so easy now.” Imagine you’re a professional boxer, and you’ve done well, and you’ve won 30 matches. You think in your 31st, the guy in the ring is going to go easy on you because you won some? That doesn’t happen at all.

So I would love to think that, gee, when I call everyone wants to work with me, everyone says yes, no one doesn’t call me back. It’s just not true. I still have to sometimes slug my way through it, and it still doesn’t go.

So that skill of persevering, and one of the things I say in the book is that one of the absolute tenets is ask, ask, ask, ask. It never goes away, and you always have to do it.

There are directors you can find who are in their 70s or 80s even, who still have to go pitch their movie. So to the people starting out, I would say learn this skill because it’s like exercise. It’s going to stay with you your whole life.

You can’t just one day say, “You know what? I’ve exercised for 10 years, I’m 30 years old, I’m going to stop.” You can’t really do that, and same with this. It just always goes.

So I think the reason people wanted to publish the book is because I found two guys, my agent and my publisher, who also have a touch of the madness.

What I did have was a bunch of stories, and the stories are fun, and the stories are relatable, and the stories are fortunate that they are on movies that people have now heard of. So I did have that body of work to draw on.

I didn’t get any breaks because I’ve been around for a while. Gee, I wish. I would take it in a second, but it doesn’t really happen.

Joanna: Yes, well, let’s come back on the, “It was so fun. I wrote it in 10 days.” I’ve read the book. It’s great, and as you say, you’re telling stories. So the style itself lends to a more storytelling way of doing it. It’s not like a business non-fiction, where it’s research and chaptered. It’s lots of stories, which is great.

When I was reading it, it is very your voice as well. Not that I know you, but it reads like your voice. So did you dictate that? Did you type it? Tell people, how did you actually get that down? Then did you edit it into an order?

What was your writing process?

Larry: Oh, so I first wrote just an outline, like a chapter outline. Then I thought, how do I really do this? I never thought of how I’d really do it. My brother said to me, you have to use some sort of a framework.

So I came up with what I call “create, ask, play.” There are three things you have to do. You have to create your idea on how to do that, you have to ask, ask, ask, and you should always do it with a playful mindset if you can.

Once I did that, the way I always write when I write scripts is I just write. I don’t think about it. I write quickly. I don’t edit myself. I try to get everything down. I write on a laptop. Then I leave it, and I come back later on, and I read it.

Sometimes I’m shocked, like, hey, that’s pretty good, or it isn’t. Then I go through it again, like painting a barn door. Then you just keep doing coats.

Then sometimes you think, well, this story doesn’t work, or I need more stories here, so I kind of have to go think over something. I just try to write as quickly as I can. I do try to write like I talk, and I try not to edit myself in the beginning.

Joanna: So when you got the publisher, did you get a load of edits that took you away from your original vision?

How was the process of publishing?

Larry: They were great. I mean, by the time I sent it to them, I had finished it and polished it a little bit. I gave it to a few people to read who I trusted, and they only had a couple of little comments. They had great copy editing comments, which I loved and thought improved things. The whole thing was incredibly nice.

Joanna: I love the way you work! I wonder if it’s also because you come from a collaborative industry. Like you said about getting notes there, you’re presumably quite used to doing notes, giving notes, getting notes, as part of a film making process.

Larry: I mean, the point of the book is to inspire people. So what I didn’t really put in the book are some of the, let’s call them harsher stories of the movie business.

When I compared the notes we get from studios, relative to the notes we get from these lovely, erudite, smart publishers, oh, my goodness. I mean, you should see the stuff we get in the movie business. So I think my comparison is crazy.

We had a script once, the whole script took place at a bar, kind of like Casablanca. A studio called us and said, “Oh, I love the script. You got to come down, we’re really interested in the movie.”

So I get down there, and all the executives are there, and they said, “We just have one idea for you.” So I said, “Yeah, sure. What?” They said, “Well, maybe there could be some sort of like a bar in the movie where they all congregate.”

The whole movie was about that, like clearly they hadn’t even read the script. So we get those kind of notes all the time.

So relatively speaking, I think notes from publishers are much—at least in my experience—are much more helpful and much more constructive.

Yes, one of the things about the movie business is it is incredibly collaborative. You have a thousand people, and you have to march them all into the same creative vision. It’s a massive operation to make a movie.

With a book, it’s really you and the typewriter, and then your editor. So it’s so small, it’s so easy to do that.

I recently published, a few weeks ago, a book of photography called Malibu Blonde, where all the money goes to charity, and that’s all photography. So it’s the same thing.

I mean, I worked with publishers in Switzerland, and I sent them a lot of pictures, and they said, “Here’s how many we want to choose,” and they had the right to choose. We went through a few rounds, and it was just such a lovely experience. The book was number one on Amazon in its first week.

So a completely different medium, there’s not like a word in it, it’s all pictures. Again, the simple nature of so few people between you and the audience, for me, was like a vacation.

Joanna: I love this framing because with so many people on my show the discussion is how difficult publishing is. You’re like, oh no, it’s so easy compared to this.

Let’s also talk about the speed because I feel like you have a different perspective on this. So for many people, like myself, as an independent author, one of the reasons we have our own independent publishing companies is so we can get our books directly to the customer with no barrier.

So I can finish, edit, and then I can send it out on Shopify, and people can buy now, and I get the money in my bank account now. That’s how quick it can be now. Obviously, I work with professional editors, designers, etc, but when the book’s ready, it goes out.

Now, you said you wrote this during the strikes, so that’s over a year ago.

How was that timeline between finishing and it going out, compared to the film industry schedule?

Larry: Well, that is different because, I mean, we finished the book, but then they said, “Okay, we’re going to rush it out,” and it was still six months before they got it out, and that was a rush.

So there was really nothing for me to do then because it was just their time, I guess, of printing catalogs and pre-selling to the Barnes and Nobles of the world and things like that.

You know, working in the movie business you have to wait too. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have other things to do. So it was fine. There was no reason it had to be out in March before October, other than my own anxiousness to get it out. So it was fine.

Joanna: Yes, I mean, sometimes movies take decades, right?

Larry: I mean, the photography book, because it’s all glossy and they had to print it, that took nine months from, “okay, we’re doing this” to coming out, too. Again, it was really nothing for me to do. That’s just their process of printing and scheduling and selling. Then when the book comes out, there’s stuff to do. It was fun.

Joanna: I love this. Is this your nature?

Are you just a happy, positive person?

Larry: I try to be. It is a funny time now, especially where the movie business has been struggling with these strikes and everything. Well, you meet people, and they’re so depressed. It’s not like it’s not challenging, I don’t want to gloss over it, but it just doesn’t help.

I mean being negative or saying, “Oh, this sucks,” it doesn’t help. The other thing is, I read an enormous amount of history. Not only film history, but just history history.

In that perspective, so many of these things have happened before. There’s nothing really new happening now. I mean, very few new things happening now.

So I try to keep that perspective and think, well —

How is being negative and complaining going to help me? It’s not going to make me feel better. It’s not going to make my movies or books advance any further. So why do it?

We say, with the photography of Malibu Blonde and with our movies, our mission is to bring back fun. I think one of the things that’s happened in the world is people are just scared to have fun. They just don’t have as much fun anymore.

I mean, even Los Angeles has changed. There aren’t as many parties or events. So, yes, we are trying to bring back fun. We’re having a big party on August 17th in Malibu for Malibu Blonde. The whole thing is to bring back fun.

So, yes. I do think it’s really important, and I think the audience wants it. I think they want it in books, and movies, and TV, and art and music. I think they want fun.

Joanna: I agree, and escapism. Like, for me, I go to the movies, and I like big explosion movies. The movies that you’ve done, I’m like, oh yeah. I want to see guns and explosions and lots of bodies. I write thrillers.

I totally agree with you. We take ourselves so seriously.

We’re artists, and it all becomes a bit too serious, I guess.

Larry: Well, I think that we get that here too with people. You know, I had a student apply for an internship, and she said, “I want to make movies that change the parameters of how people think about art.”

I said, “What’s the example of a movie that does that?” She said, “Oh, that’s a good question. I never thought of that.” So people virtue signal a lot.

One of the things I also try to espouse in A Touch of the Madness is that —

You really have to play it like a game, and remain in a state of play

—which I admit is not easy to stay in all the time—but in a state of play, you will be more creative, you’ll be more receptive to ideas, you’ll be a better problem solver, and you’ll have a better life.

So if you take the same two examples, and you look at it from a state of play or a state not of play, they’re very, very, very, very different.

The first movie I was involved in, it was before Game of Thrones, it was like a Game of Thrones rip off in Italy. I had just been made Head of Production at my new job, and my boss, who was a great guy, said, “We want everything. We want explosions, and violence, and sword fights, and love, and sex!”

Then someone yelled, “And snakes and wizards!” We were like, “Hah, yes! And snakes and wizards!” There were no snakes and wizards in the movie, but we thought that was funny.

So every time we would finish a development meeting with the staff in Italy as they were in pre-production, we’d say, “And snakes and wizards!” And we’d all go, “Snakes and wizards!”

So I get to Italy, it’s my first movie, I have no idea what I’m doing. It was a seasoned producer who was helping me. At one point they say they have a surprise for me that week, and I’m like, great.

They get really excited, and the day comes. Now we’re having lunch, and they’re all in a semi-circle around me. We’re outside of Rome, and I see that we’re looking at the hills, I don’t see anything. Then I see a little dot of dirt, and it’s getting bigger and bigger, and I realize it’s a truck coming.

Now there’s a band playing, I don’t know where they got a band. Then a truck backs up, and it bursts open, and out come a ton of people dressed as wizards who were snake charmers. I mean, like boa constrictors and Burmese pythons.

Remember, there were no snakes and wizards in the movie. We had just forgot to tell them it was a joke. So they clearly had gone to all this time and effort and money.

Now, not in the state of play, I would have said, “How could you have done this? You didn’t check. You wasted my time. You wasted our money. What are we going to do?”

In a state of play, which I was because I couldn’t believe I was on a movie, it was fun. They’d gone to a lot of trouble. In Italy, you have wine at lunch on your movie sets, and also it’s not easy to say no to a Burmese python staring you in the face.

So in that state of play, I said, “Let’s put them all on the movie!” Everyone cheered, and we just threw him in the movie. Now, you know what? The movie’s terrible, but it made a fortune, and the snakes and wizards look great. Not in a state of play, I would have screwed up the whole thing.

Joanna: I love that. So I’m going to come back to what you said there.

I want to talk about this state of play because it does fit a bit with your “a touch of madness.” How do we identify this touch of madness and get into that state of play?

For example, you know, I’m a professional writer. This is my full time job. So I get up in the morning, like today, I worked on my latest novel. Some days that’s great and I’m in the play zone, and sometimes it’s a real slog. So how can I and other people listening—

How can we reset and get into that state of play every time we create?

Is there a way that you recommend we do that? Or how can we access that touch of madness?

Larry: Well, I think if you have a touch of the madness—I think everyone has the potential for it—and I believe deep down, we all know what we want. It’s there.

So I did a documentary a few years ago on mindfulness with a Zen Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s recently passed away, but who brought mindfulness to the west.

I met him under these very unusual circumstances. I called this peaceful Buddhist monk to see if he would be a good inspiration for a character in Mortal Kombat, which is hardly a peaceful movie. In so doing, I just became great friends with the guy.

I said, “I’ve been here for two hours. I feel like I’ve been on vacation. What’s your secret?” He said, “No secret. Practice.” I became friends with him, and I started practicing mindfulness, and he asked me to do a documentary.

So for me, it’s getting still, and for me, it’s mindfulness, and for me, it’s the notion that, okay, if I’m starting to drift out of a state of play, stop. Whatever I’m doing, stop if I can. In the middle of the day, go for a walk, play with my dog. I bring my dog to work.

So something to reset yourself because that is the most important thing.

If you’re in a good state of mind, everything else will come.

So one, you have to prioritize your state of mind. And two, you have to get some practice that enables you to control and come back to a still state of mind.

For me, it’s mindfulness. For someone else, it might be knitting or shooting basketball or whatever. Once you’re in a still state of mind, you can access that state of play. Taken from this great expression which is calligraphy to my office, “Be still and know.”

So think of a mountain lake, if it’s perfectly still in the morning, it reflects the clouds and the sky and the mountaintops perfectly. If it’s all choppy and windy, it doesn’t. So think of that stillness and be still, and that will access your touch of madness.

You will say, this is what I really wanted. Now that I’m still, I know what I really want to do is teach cows how to answer the phone, and I’m going to do it. That’s what you want.

Now you have to have the courage to do it, which is what ask and play comes into. It’s prioritizing your state of mind is the most important thing you have to do. Then it’s having a practice which enables you to do that.

Joanna: Well, then how about the difficulty, both in the film industry and with books, where people say—I mean, like you talk about Mortal Kombat, for example, is more like a franchise. It has lots of IP, and people say, “Oh, well, do you know what, we want another one of those.” Or they want Terminator 18.

You’re like, does that really have a touch of madness? Is that a business decision or is that a creative decision?

How do you balance the business side with wanting to do something that people might deem a bit mad?

Larry: So when I started Mortal Kombat, no one had ever made a hit movie from a video game. Everyone thought I was crazy. I mean, it’s easy to look back now, all great ideas are obvious in hindsight.

At the time, people were constantly like, what are you doing? You’re giving up your career. I left this great job. It’s not. So that was a touch of the madness at that time.

The way I balance the two sides is the first thing I do when I look at any project, book, or movie, is I just forget about the business, and I say, creatively, do I love it? Do I just love this, love this?

You’re right. It might be quick like my book, or it might take 10 years like some movies, but I’ve got to love it. Otherwise I can’t get up every day and be happy pitching it, talking about it, working on it, writing it, designing it, and so forth. Then I ignore the business side.

Once I know I love it creatively, I ignore the creative side, and then I look at the business. Can I get this financed? Can this make money?

Can we do this? If they’re both yeses, then I do it.

Part of my goal with the things I do is to succeed. I want a lot of people to see my movies and read my books. So to me, that business part of it is part of the whole thing. I mean, there are some filmmakers who say, “Well, I don’t care if anyone sees my movie.” I do. That’s the fun. That’s the game.

You want people to see your movie. You want to go to the theater and have people lined up to see it and cheer. So that, to me, is part of the game, and it’s fun.

The way I got Mortal Kombat, it was testing as an arcade game in Chicago. It was just an arcade game. We used to go put coins in machines to play.

I turned to the chairman of the company who had it, who I knew from previous arcade games in previous movies, and I said, “This Star Wars meets Enter the Dragon. It’s my two favorite genres. I don’t care if it’s never worked before, if you give me the rights, I guarantee you I will produce it in every medium in the world. Movies, TV, animation, by theater, you name it.”

The chairman of the company looked at me and said, “Eh, piece of crap video game.” So he didn’t even think it was worth it.

My goal was to do what you just said, to make it a franchise, which we’re still producing. We’re still making Mortal Kombat. So that was the goal, but it didn’t start that way. It started with people telling me I was crazy.

Joanna: No, that’s great. Then if we could just talk about this idea of quality, which again, books and movies struggle with. You said just a while ago —

“The movie was terrible. It made a fortune.”

This is what’s so funny, right? Sometimes we write these things that we think are really important or whatever, and nobody wants them. Then sometimes something just hits and does really well that is just unexpected. So how do you deal with that in your career and creativity? Like you said—

Are you aiming to try to have a hit, or is it all just a crapshoot? As an American might say.

Larry: No, I’m aiming to have a hit. I’m always aiming to have a hit. So I wanted to be movie producers since I was a little kid. I got very, very lucky and got a great job out of school as Head of production acquisitions and coproduction for an independent film studio called Vestron.

This was in the 80s when home video was taking off. So home video was a boom, like today, streaming was a boom, and people needed content. My job out of school was to run a film slate that needed to deliver 80 movies a year to the company.

Today, a film studio would make 12 movies. I had to make 80, and I didn’t know what I was doing. My instructions were, do whatever the hell you want, don’t lose money.

So in the beginning I was so scared I’d we lose money. So we made low budget movies like the one I just mentioned. Action, rom coms, horror movies and things like that. They were fun.

We tried to make them as good as we can, but I kept remembering, if I don’t make money, I’m not going to be able to be able to keep doing this.

Then I got a script one day for a movie called Platoon. Platoon was not this kind of a movie, it was a very serious movie about the Vietnam War and the psychological effect it had on kids going to it. The tagline was, “The first casualty of war is innocence.”

The actors were not stars. They were stars later, but they weren’t stars in the beginning. We always put at least sort of movie stars in our movies, but I loved it. I thought I just got to make it. I just love the movie.

I went to my boss, and I said, “This isn’t our usual one, but I just have a feeling about it.” He said, “You’re crazy. That’s not what we do.”

I fought, and he said, “Okay, look, you’re head of production. It’s your decision, but if it fails, you’re fired. So what do you want to do?”

I was like, I don’t know, a few months into the best job in the world, and I thought, well, I didn’t join the movie business to play it safe. So I greenlit Platoon.

When I saw Platoon, when it was finally finished, I’m the only guy in history to giggle his way through that movie, because I thought, oh my god, I’m not getting fired. It was so good. It was so good that it did win Best Picture that year.

A few months later, I ran into the director one night in a bar in New York, and he bought me a drink, and he said, “Kid, I always liked you. You have a touch of the madness.”

I thought, touch of the madness? Does he mean I’m a little crazy? Is he calling me crazy? Then it occurred to me, well, my boss was crazy to let a 25 year old kid run an 80 picture film slate. Oliver, the director, had a touch of the madness by insisting on doing a Vietnam movie the way no one ever had.

Then I had a touch of the madness by betting my career on it. So then I realized, and this is the long answer to your short question, that it’s all attached to the madness.

Bottom line, I can tell you all the things I do, you know, it’s got to be creative, it’s got to be business.

I look at everybody, every script, every piece of art, every casting, and I ask myself, just instinctively, is there a touch of the madness there? If there is, I go for it.

If there isn’t, I don’t. I turn away lots of actors and lots of people who are very talented or very good, but in my mind, they don’t have that touch of the madness. I can look in people’s eyes and see it, at least I think I can. So that is really my determining factor.

That became my touchstone for my life and my career. So when I decided to write a book about this, it wasn’t like I had to dredge around to think about it. I’ve been thinking about this my whole life. It just never occurred to me that that’s what I was doing.

Joanna: Yes, it’s so interesting. I use the metaphor of Plato’s Chariot with the white horse and the dark horse, and can I let my dark horse run? Like is my dark horse running, or am I reining it in?

Larry: That’s great.

Joanna: Yes, too much. Sometimes I know I’ve written things where my dark horse just wasn’t even there. So now I’m more established, I guess.

It’s very hard at the beginning, like you said, that first job when you had to make 80 a year. Not every single film you would have loved or been that involved with. It feels like now you just love creating. So you’re just creating and creating.

Larry: I do.

I love it. I’m as excited about the movie business as the first day.

I wanted to be a producer since I was a little kid. Then when I started doing it, I loved it, and I still wake up as excited as can be. What’s exciting is bringing the projects I have to life.

I think of these characters as my friends. I know them. I think sometimes, “Oh, Lucian,” he’s a character in a movie, “Oh, Lucian would do that.” I love creating, and I love doing that.

To get a movie made today in a conservative Hollywood, you need to raise $100 million and convince a lot of people it’s a great idea. So you have to be in love, or it’s a tough game.

Joanna: Well, then another thing that’s interesting is this idea of longevity in an industry. When you started out, there would have been other people who started with you, and they will not all be around anymore.

This is what we also talk about in the author industry, which is the longer you do this, the more likely you are to be successful, but so many people fall away. So has that happened? What are your tips for longevity in the career? How do you keep loving it after decades?

Larry: Talent is 50% of the battle.

If you don’t have perseverance in any industry, in any game, in any sport, forget it.

As I said, I think I’m really good at discerning talent or touch the madness in two seconds, but whether that person will have the fortitude to stay with it, only time will tell.

Character isn’t made, it’s revealed, and you can only tell that with time. So there are people who just, for one reason or another, drop out.

Now, sometimes people drop out because they determine, you know what, this isn’t really for me. It’s not as exciting as I thought. I can make a lot more money in the family business of whatever, and that’s really what I care about.

If you do love it, there’s really no other option.

That is where I think, especially in creative industries, it should be full of people who really don’t have another option in their minds because it’s just what they have to do.

Joanna: Yes, I feel that.

Larry: You know, the number one way we lose aspiring actors and actresses, lose meaning they go away, leave Hollywood, is by giving them a job.

You would think that’s insane, but there’s an enormous amount of people when you finally say, “Okay, you want to be an actor. We like you. Here’s your shot,” you never hear from them again. Whether that’s the fear so they don’t really want to do it, and I try to inspire people out of in my book. Again, there’s just so much you can do, and it’s not right for them. That’s okay.

Joanna: So let’s come back, earlier you were talking about Ask anyone, anything. It’s in the book, ask anyone anything. The whole section is really interesting, and this is a real challenge for authors who mostly are introverts, who work alone. We much prefer the page, and we’re not out and about.

Like someone said to me once, “Oh, just come to Cannes and pitch at this party.” Like, that’s the most terrifying thing for me, possibly.

What are your thoughts on pitching for introvert authors?

Larry: Well, so I have two thoughts on that. So I had a great professor in college who taught me this. So I’ve been doing this since college, since before I was a producer, and it worked even then.

A few years ago during the pandemic, we were making an animated movie universe called Bobbleheads. It had characters with bobbling heads. We had this idea to get Cher as Bobblehead Cher, use her likeness. Everyone said, again, she’ll never do it. She’s never done an animated movie.

So we called, and I called and called, and long story short, Cher did the movie, and she was fantastic in it. When the movie came out, People Magazine interviewed her and said, “You’ve never done an animated movie, why did you do this one?”

She said, “I never did an animated movie before because no one ever asked me before.”

So if you can imagine Cher, who’s one of the most iconic, famous, most talented women on the planet has never been asked to do something, can you imagine who in your own life you’re not asking because you’re assuming, oh, everyone asks them? Maybe no one’s asked, so why don’t you do it?

So then, how do you do it? You start small. Today, honestly, it’s much easier. When I started doing it in college, there was no email. so you actually had to call somebody or write them an actual letter. Now you can email, text, DM, there’s so many ways to get to people.

Start small. Call Uncle Phil and ask him why he never comes to holidays. I mean, you can do anything. Call your local grocery store and say, “How come you don’t stock this brand that I like?” Just start.

Once you get into the methodology of it and into the habit of it, it gets easier and easier because you realize, well, so what if they say no? What’s going to happen? The sky isn’t going to fall in. I mean, I call people all the time and ask them things.

It’s like your question in the beginning. Well, everyone wants to deal with me. No, I wish. A lot of people don’t answer me or say no to me. I’m like, who could say no to me? You know, my over-inflated ego. The answer, unfortunately, is lots of people. So what? All you need is one yes.

Joanna: I know my listeners are sitting there going, well, but how? Okay, so let’s say I do send an email, and it comes to someone I’ve identified because I’ve spent some time researching them, and I know this person would be interested.

So this might be a producer, I guess. I’m not sending it to an actor, I’m sending it to a producer. Or who else would I send it to? What would be the one thing that’s going to make them interested in a conversation?

Larry: So if you want to sell the film rights to your book?

Joanna: Yes.

Larry: So you’d send it to producers, or you’d send it to agents. Now in the UK, by the way, the book agents and the film agents are acting much nicer than in Los Angeles. So I shouldn’t say that, but they are, and they’re much more literary. They tend to read more. So you have to think —

When you’re selling a book for a movie, you’re really selling the plot.

One of the things you can do in a book is you can obviously write what the character is thinking. In a movie you have to show.

A long time ago when Jurassic Park came out, in those days they would auction books. I was working with Jim Cameron those days, and we were number two in the auction list. So if Steven Spielberg didn’t take it, we got it, and Spielberg took it.

At the same time, The Bonfire of the Vanities was being auctioned by Tom Wolfe. Brilliant book. The two books got huge money, and they were both in production the same time. One is a multi-multi-billion dollar franchise, and it’s still getting made, and the other failed. Why?

Because if you just take Tom Wolfe’s book, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and you just take the plot, it’s about a miserable guy who ruins his life and the life of everyone around him. It’s not so intriguing.

If you take Jurassic Park, Dinosaur Park goes awry, that’s a movie. So you have to think, what is it in your book that translates into the different medium?

You have to understand that because they’re going to throw away three quarters of what you wrote because you’re saying, “And then he thought this,” and you can’t do that in a movie. So the first thing is, okay, why?

Why is your book unique? You need a pitch line.

Again, I mean Michael Crichton, every one of his books almost is just a brilliant pitch for a movie.

So think about, you’re going to hate this, but think about describing your book in one sentence. Think about two things, there’s a log line and then there’s a tagline. A tagline is kind of a slogan. The log line is a line or two about the plot.

Tagline is, if you look at the movie Alien, the first Alien movie, the tagline was a genius one, “In space, no one can hear your scream.” So think of those two things, that’s what people are going to buy.

Then you have to think to yourself, okay, well, what characters do I have in my book? Let’s say my characters are all 11 years old. Well, that’s going to be hard because they’re not a lot of 11 year old movie stars.

So people are looking for star actors, but they say, well, there are three roles in my book for men and women who are 40 years old. You think, oh, my God, this is great. There’s a ton of stars for it.

That’s what you want to do.

Help the producer or the agent, who you might think is very creative, but help them envision it.

Here’s the title, here’s the log line, here’s the tagline, here’s who should play my character. Help them envision it because that’s how they’re going to resell it.

Joanna: You say you’re selling the plot, and again, as authors, most people are told it’s all about character first. It’s so interesting because you’re starting with the plot there, and it’s got to be visual, on the screen. I certainly write that way because that’s the kind of movies I like, so I like that kind of book as well.

I’s very interesting that what we’re told as authors is kind of different to screenwriters and movie people.

Larry: Yes, but maybe for novels, that’s correct. Certainly, you want the characters to shine in a movie, but you have to show what they do. You can’t tell. I mean, that’s the number one screenwriting rule, show, don’t tell. I mean, “He’s cold,” is different than, “He’s in his underwear in the Himalayas in a snowstorm turning blue.” So it’s all visual.

You have to think visually. If you write that way in your books, then you’re in great shape.

I mean, Crichton’s books are like that. They read just like a movie script, so it’s fantastic.

People don’t like to be terribly analytical, and remember, the process of turning a book into a movie is a long, expensive one. You have to hire writers, you have to get someone to do it. Sometimes that takes years and costs millions of dollars. So people are reticent to do it unless there’s something great.

You said something in the beginning of this, I want to challenge you. You said, “Well, I’m not saying it to an actor.” Why not? I mean, I wouldn’t just send it to anybody, but if you think of what I did with Cher, if you think this is just perfect for whoever, Tom Hanks, what do you get to lose?

Again, all you have to do is email today. You don’t have to call the guy. You don’t have to go to Cannes and pitch him. You should, but you can work your way up to that. You can just email. So what if they don’t answer? Try, you never know.

I mean, sometimes people take a shot at things. I get stuff like that all the time, and I’m pretty good if I think it’s interesting.

Here’s an example. During the pandemic, we couldn’t cast like normal. In action movies, I like putting in wherever I can, new people, because I think the audience likes that.

So we found a couple of people, especially one on Instagram. There’s a woman we found on Instagram, and she’s on the cover of my Malibu Blonde book, and she’s now set to star in one of our next movies. We just found her on Instagram, and we worked together. So why not?

If I said to you, like your last book, who’s the star of that movie? Who really should play your main character? Do you know?

Joanna: Oh, well, I’m totally sending my book to Nicolas Cage then!

Larry: Why not? Nicolas Cage has a touch of the madness.

Joanna: Oh, he does. He does.

Larry: Well message Nicholas Cage and be bold as hell. “Only you can play this. I wrote this for you.” You know, people in America assume everyone in in the UK is smarter than they are, so use that.

“I’m an author in Bath, England. I want you to be in my movie, so I had to send it to you first. I wrote this out of passion.” Why not?

Joanna: You’ve inspired me. You’ve inspired me. That is great, actually. That really helps. We’re almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about technology because in the book, you say,

“Let technology serve your idea, not the other way around.”

You and your company, Threshold, have been at the forefront of technological innovation, the first morphing in a movie in Terminator 2. I bet you everyone can picture that in their head.

Now, part of the strikes was generative AI. There’s a lot of AI kind of coming or happening already for video, music, books, writing. So what are your thoughts on how things are changing, the good things that are happening, the challenges with generative AI?

Larry: For the movie business, I think there’s an enormous amount of opportunity in AI before the machines take over. So because I was involved in Terminator 2, you know, we used to think about this in a development way, and now it’s really happening.

So it is kind of unusual, but whether you like it or don’t, the first thing is, it’s happening. It’s coming. It’s a tidal wave. You can’t stop a tidal wave, so you better learn how to surf. So it’s coming.

My point is, if you just jump in the bandwagon because everyone’s doing it, you’re going to fail. If you think to yourself, here’s a problem, and AI could solve it, you won’t.

So for me, my belief is one of the problems and the challenges in the movie business is movies have gotten a little too expensive. So people are more conservative and it’s harder to make money.

All AI does for us in that category is things that we do anyway, just quicker, faster and better.

It’s no different than an assembly line to manufacturing. So in the entire history of the movie business and the whole industrial revolution, I mean, every new invention, everyone thought, “Oh, my God, that’s going to be it.”

People thought TV would ruin theaters, and then home video would ruin theater. It doesn’t. It just makes the whole pie bigger and the slices smaller, but the whole game is getting bigger.

So for me, for AI, we think, well, we can show things, we can do things that we were doing before, just with better technology. So for example, one of the big misnomers about the actor strike was they kept saying, “Well, what if there are digital stunt people and digital extras?”

We’ve been using digital extras for 15 years.

I mean, what do you think, every time you see a Coliseum they got 60,000 people to sit there? Or we used to throw people off buildings, human beings, we don’t do that anymore.

I wanted a panther for Mortal Kombat. When the panther came and looked at this animatronic seven-foot four-arm creature, and said no way. Today, we would never bring a panther on a set, you just do it digitally. It’s just better.

AI for the movies enables you to do things with visual effects that we’ve been doing anyway, just better, faster, cheaper. That’s great because all we should care about, and all you should care about as writers, is the audience.

You don’t work for the producer, I always tell people. You don’t work for the director, you don’t work for the studio, you work for the audience.

Your audience just wants to see a great movie or read a great book or whatever. They don’t care how you did it, and nor should they bother caring, nor should you burden them with it.

I started a new company recently called Supergiant Studios, where any client can come to us and star in a short film with a celebrity, with a Hollywood celebrity. It’s a great bucket list thing to do, and it’s working really well. We just had Tom Arnold from True Lies in one of the movies. It’s a great bucket list thing to do.

One of the things is, because they’re short films and we want to keep the cost as low as we can for the client, if we want the establishing shot in Bath, England year one, we can do that now in these little movies, whereas before, there’s no way we could do that. So it’s great.

Just like morphing was great. Just like 3D Steadicam, which we helped invent, was great. People are just scared because they’re scared.

The final thing is, any new technology has an upside and a downside. Water has an upside and a downside. You don’t want to be around a tidal wave, but it’s great. So I think, just again, it’s just fear. It’s just the fear we have to get over.

Joanna: And creative people will keep creating, regardless.

Larry: You know, everyone forgets this, but when laptops became prevalent, everyone said, “Oh, well, now everyone has access to a computer that can help you with everything. Everyone’s going to be Shakespeare.” Well, you know what, everyone’s not Shakespeare.

Creating and talent is hard, and AI is a tool. If you use it as a tool, it’ll help you be a good whatever you do, but that’s it. I think it’s fantastic.

Joanna: Brilliant. I love that.

Where can people find the book and everything you do online?

Larry: So the book is every place books are sold. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or they can go to ATouchOfTheMadness.com and find out. I’m at LarryKasanoff.com, or @LarryKasanoff on Instagram, or ThresholdEntertainment.com. Any of those places.

Joanna: Well, thanks for your time, Larry. That was great.

Larry: Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.

The post A Touch of the Madness: Creativity In Writing And Filmmaking With Larry Kasanoff first appeared on The Creative Penn.