A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  I met and talked to Veronica several times after that first meeting at Sting’s house. Over time, what I came to understand was that she had found a capacity inside herself that most of us never go looking for, let alone have to depend on.

  The only way to persevere is to have the capacity to calmly separate yourself from what is being done to you.

  Veronica figured out that to withstand being tortured, she had to take herself out of the reality of what was being done to her. You slow your brain down, you slow yourself down. People talk about being in “flow,” when they’re writing, when they’re surfing or rock-climbing or running, when they’re lost in doing something completely absorbing.

  What Veronica told me is that to survive being tortured, hour after hour, every day for eight months, she had to get into a state of flow as well, but a flow state of an alternate reality, that has its own narrative. That’s how she survived. She couldn’t control the physical world, but she could control her psychological reaction to it.

  It’s a mechanism, and it’s how she saved herself. In fact, it’s a storytelling mechanism. You have to find a different story to tell yourself to take you out of the torture.

  Veronica’s story is so compelling that we tried to capture it in a movie, Closet Land. Closet Land has just two characters—a woman and her torturer. It was always going to have a small audience, because it is so intense, so unrelenting. But I wanted to do a movie that gets viewers inside the mind of someone who is being tortured. Torture takes place all over the planet, and I wanted people to be able to see it.

  What I learned from Veronica, her sense of mastery, connects to the psychology of the characters in many other movies and shows. When I first read astronaut Jim Lovell’s account of the explosion and crisis on the Apollo 13 capsule, I couldn’t really grasp the details of the spacecraft, the orbital mechanics, the issues with fuel and carbon dioxide and skipping off the top of Earth’s atmosphere. What I connected with immediately was the sense Lovell conveyed of being trapped, of being in a physical setting, also a life-or-death setting, where he and his fellow astronauts had lost control. They had to adopt a mind-set like Veronica’s—they had to create an alternate narrative—to have the psychological strength to get themselves back to Earth. I think that movie, too, owes a lot to Veronica de Negri.

  You might expect someone who had survived what Veronica was put through to be discouraged, to be cynical, to lack a certain basic hope.

  She isn’t like that at all. She’s vibrant. She’s a person of intellect, and obviously a person of inner strength. She isn’t cheery or buoyant, but she has great energy, fierce energy.

  And she has this incredible human capacity to rely on her own psychic strength to survive. That’s what is so urgent to me about people’s emotional makeup. What saved Veronica was her character, her personality, the story she was able to tell herself.

  • • •

  CURIOSITY CONNECTS YOU TO reality.

  I live in two overlapping worlds that are often far from reality: the world of Hollywood show business, and the world of storytelling. In Hollywood, we have a sense of being at the center of the world. Our creative work touches everyone in the United States, as well as a huge part of the rest of the world. We deal with actors and directors who are famous and, in Hollywood, powerful—powerful in that they can demand large paychecks, they can command armies of staff and technicians, they can pick their work, they can create whole new worlds from scratch, and they can specify all kinds of quirky elements about things like the food they’ll eat. Our projects involve huge sums of money—both the dollars to get a project made in the first place, and the dollars they make when they succeed in theaters and on TV. The millions are often in the triple digits, and we’re now firmly in the era of the billion-dollar film franchise, and the era of the billion-dollar acting career.2

  So Hollywood absolutely has a huge sense of importance about what we do, and we have a huge sense of importance about the people who do it. It’s possible to lose track of the difference between the stories we’re telling, with as much vividness and texture as we can possibly create, and the real world. For while the money is real—the risks are real, and they are often large—the rest of it is, of course, showbiz, make-believe.

  A comedy about the New York City morgue—Night Shift—doesn’t involve any dead bodies.

  A TV drama about producing a sports news show—Sports Night—involves no sporting events, no sports figures, no news.

  A movie about the brutal reality of drug smuggling—American Gangster—involves no actual drugs or brutality.

  Even in a great love story, no one typically falls in love.

  Just as important, storytelling itself is not reality. That may seem obvious, but it’s not at all. When you come home from work and tell your wife or husband “the story” of your day, you reshape those nine hours to highlight the drama, to make your own role the centerpiece, to leave out the boring parts (which may be eight hours of the nine). And you’re telling a real story about your real day.

  In the movies and on TV, we’re always trying to tell stories that are true—whether it’s Frost/Nixon, about real people and real events, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, about a child’s fantasy. The stories need to be “true” in emotional terms, true in thematic terms, not necessarily true in factual terms. For any movie that purports to tackle a set of real events, there’s now typically a website detailing all the things we “got wrong”—you can read about the departures from reality in Gravity and Captain Phillips. We released Apollo 13 in the summer of 1995—before Google was on the Internet—but you can read about the ways the movie differs from the factual story of the rescue at a half dozen websites.3 You can even read about the differences between 2014’s movie Noah with Russell Crowe, and the biblical Noah, that is, the differences between the movie and the “real” story of a mythic biblical figure.4

  The truth is, we want to tell great stories, captivating stories, and so we tweak the stories all the time—in fact, when we’re making a movie or a TV show, we tweak the stories every day, while we’re making them—in order to get more immediacy, or to move things along more quickly. We tweak them to make them seem more realistic, even when we’re actually deviating from the “facts.” We’re all storytellers, and in about the third grade we start to learn the difference between a story that is true and a story that is factually correct.

  It is very easy to get caught up in the urgency and the charisma of Hollywood. It’s a hermetic world (it doesn’t help that we’re in California, far from a lot of the big decision making in Washington, DC, and New York City). It’s very easy to get caught up in the world of episodic storytelling.

  Curiosity pulls me back to reality. Asking questions of real people, with lives outside the movie business, is a bracing reminder of all the worlds that exist beyond Hollywood.

  You can make as many movies as you want about war or black ops or revolution or prison. They’re just movies. What was done to Veronica de Negri was not a movie, it was real—her pain and her survival.

  • • •

  WHEN YOU WATCH A movie that is completely engrossing, what happens to you? I’m talking about one of those movies where you lose track of time, where everything fades away except the fate of the characters, and their world, on screen. One of those movies where you walk out onto the sidewalk afterward, blinking, reentering reality, thinking, Wow, it’s a Sunday afternoon in spring. Whew.

  When you binge-watch the latest episodes of Arrested Development or House of Cards, what causes you to touch the PLAY button just one more time, six times in a row?

  When you read a book, what keeps you in the chair, turning pages way past the moment when you should have set the book down and gone to sleep?

  National Public Radio knows exactly how riveting its radio storytelling can be. NPR has figured out that people often park, turn off the engine, then sit in the car in the driveway, waiting to hear the end of a particular story that isn’t
quite finished. NPR calls these “driveway moments.”5 Why would anyone put the last three minutes of a story on NPR ahead of going inside to dinner and their family?

  Curiosity.

  Curiosity keeps you turning the pages of the book, it tugs you along to watch just one more episode, it causes you to lose track of the day and the time and the weather when you’re in a theater seat. Curiosity creates NPR’s “driveway moments.”6

  Curiosity is a vital piece of great storytelling—the power of a story to grab hold of your attention, to create the irresistible pull of that simple question: what’s going to happen next?

  Good stories have all kinds of powerful elements. They have fascinating characters caught in revealing or meaningful or dramatic dilemmas. They have talented acting, good writing, and vivid voices. They have plots that are surprising, with great pacing and settings that transport you to the story’s location. They create a world into which you can slip effortlessly—and then lose yourself.

  But it’s all in service of one goal: Making you care. You can say you care about the characters or the story, but all you really care about is what’s going to happen next. What’s going to happen in the end? How is the tangle of plot lines going to be untangled? How is the tangle of human relationships going to be untangled?

  A story may or may not make its point memorably. It may or may not be entertaining or compelling, funny or sad, upsetting, even enraging.

  But none of those qualities matter if you don’t get the whole story—if you don’t actually watch the movie or read the book. If you don’t stick around, it doesn’t matter what the point of the story is. To be effective, a story has to keep you in the chair—whether you’re holding a Kindle, or sitting in your car with your hand on the radio knob, or sitting in the multiplex.

  Inspiring curiosity is the first job of a good story.

  How often have you started reading a newspaper or magazine story with a great headline, about a topic you care about, only to give up after a few paragraphs, thinking, That story didn’t live up to the headline.

  Curiosity is the engine that provides the momentum of good storytelling. But I think there’s an even more powerful connection between them.

  Storytelling and curiosity are really indispensable to each other. They certainly reinforce and refresh each other. But they might actually do more. Curiosity helps create storytelling. And there’s no question storytelling inspires curiosity.

  Curiosity is fun and enriching personally, in isolation. But the value and the fun of curiosity are magnified by sharing what you’ve learned. If you go to the zoo and see the new panda cubs, or you go to Florence and spend three days looking at Renaissance art, there’s nothing like coming home and telling your family and friends “the story” of your trip. We read aloud the most amazing tidbits from the newspaper over breakfast. Half of what’s on Twitter is literally people saying, “Look what I just read—can you believe this?” Someone’s Twitter stream is a tour through what that person thinks is interesting enough to share—a journey through their version of clickable curiosity.

  If you go all the way back in time to the earliest human tribes, some kind of storytelling was indispensable to survival. The person who discovered the nearby spring of water had to communicate that. The mother who had to snatch her wandering child from the stalking cougar had to communicate that. The person who first found wild potatoes and figured out how to eat them had to communicate that.

  Curiosity is great, but if what we learn evaporates, if it goes no further than our own experience, then it doesn’t really help us.

  Curiosity itself is essential to survival.

  But the power of human development comes from being able to share what we learn, and to accumulate it.

  And that’s what stories are: shared knowledge.

  Curiosity motivates us to explore and discover. Storytelling allows us to share the knowledge and excitement of what we’ve figured out. And that storytelling in turn inspires curiosity in the people to whom we’re talking.

  If you learn about the nearby spring, you may immediately be curious about trying to find it yourself. If you hear about this new food, the potato, you may be curious if you can cook it, and what it will taste like.

  Even modern stories that are emotionally satisfying often leave you curious. How many people watch Ron Howard’s Apollo 13—which has a deeply satisfying ending—then want to learn more about that mission, or the Apollo program and spaceflight in general?

  There is, of course, a profession that connects curiosity and storytelling: journalism. That’s what being a reporter is. But, in fact, we’re all storytellers. We’re all journalists and novelists of our own lives and relationships. Twitter, Instagram, and blogging are modern ways of saying “Here’s what’s happening in my life.” What is the old-fashioned family dinner table but a kind of nightly news roundup of your family?

  Much of the power of stories comes from their emotional heft. That’s where the humor and the joy are, the excitement and the unforgettableness. We learn how to behave, in part, from the stories of how other people behave—whether those stories are told by sixth-grade girls over lunch, or by software engineers whose product didn’t succeed with a new customer, or by Jane Austen in her novel Sense and Sensibility. Stories are how we learn about the world, but also how we learn about other people, about what’s going on in their heads, and how it differs from what’s going on in our heads.

  From the moment we’re born, from the moment we wake up in the morning, we’re saturated in stories. Even when we’re asleep, our brains are telling us stories.

  One of the great unresolved questions of life on Earth is: why are humans able to make such great intellectual and social progress, compared to other animals?

  Maybe it’s the opposable thumb.

  Maybe it’s the size and structure of our brains.

  Maybe it’s language.

  Maybe it’s our ability to seize and use fire.

  But maybe what makes humans unique is our ability to tell stories—and our reflex to constantly connect curiosity and storytelling in an M. C. Escher–like spiral. Our stories and our curiosity mirror each other. They are what make us successful, and also human.

  • • •

  WHEN I WAS GROWING up, my reading ability was severely impaired.

  I couldn’t read at all in my early years of elementary school. I’d look at the words on the page, but they made no sense. I couldn’t sound them out, I couldn’t connect the symbols printed there with the language I knew and used every day.

  Back in the 1950s, when I was young, there were only two reasons you couldn’t read in the third grade. You were stupid, or you were stubborn. But I was just baffled, and frustrated, and always worried about school.

  People didn’t start talking about dyslexia until ten years after I was in third grade and they didn’t start really helping typical kids with it until ten years after that. Today, I might have been classified as dyslexic.

  As it was, I got Fs in elementary school, with the occasional D. My savior was my grandmother—my mom’s mother Sonia, a classic 4-foot-10 Jewish grandmother. She was always telling me I was something special.

  My mother was upset—her son was failing third grade! She went off and found me a reading tutor, who slowly taught me to lasso the letters and the words on the page. My grandmother, on the other hand, was totally imperturbable. It was a real counterpoint.

  She just kept telling me, “You’re curious. Your curiosity is good. Think big!” My grandmother could see beyond the report card; it felt like she could see inside my head. She knew I was as hungry to learn as every other kid. I just had a hard time satisfying that hunger.

  My grandmother really helped make me something of a dreamer. She said to me, “Don’t let the system define you. You’re already defined—you’re curious!”

  What a thing to say to a boy in elementary school—“Don’t let the system define you!” But thank goodness she did. My grandmother
taught me a lot, but one of the most important things she imparted was that all you really need is one champion.

  When you can’t read, and then when you’ve learned to read with real effort, a couple of things happen. First, in school, you hide out. If you can’t do the reading, you can’t answer the teacher’s questions in class. So I was always ducking, not raising my hand, trying to be invisible. I was trying to avoid being humiliated.

  When reading is hard work, you’re cut off from the ease with which people learn by reading. And you’re cut off from stories. For most people, reading is simply an unthinking tool—sometimes it’s hard, when the material is hard, but often it’s a source of joy or fun or pleasure. It’s always a source of great stories.

  But reading itself was so hard for me, I didn’t curl up with a book just for fun, just to be carried off to a different world the way so many kids are—and adults, too, of course. And I couldn’t decide the way a sixth grader might that I was interested in something—the solar system, whales, Abe Lincoln—and go check out a stack of books on that topic from the library.

  I had to be resourceful to learn what I wanted to learn, and also patient and determined.

  My reading ability gradually improved throughout high school. If what I had was dyslexia, I seemed to grow out of it as I grew up. As an adult, I do read—I read scripts and newspapers, books and magazines, memos and email. But every page is an effort. The work never fades. Reading for me, reading for someone who is dyslexic, I think, is a little bit like what math is for many people: you have to work so hard at getting the problem into your brain that you can lose track of the point of the problem itself. Even today, in my sixties, the physical effort of reading drains some of the pleasure I might take from whatever it is I’m reading.