A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  As part of the visit, we had a long lunch with Fidel Castro. Castro was wearing his usual green army fatigues, and he talked to us through a translator for three and a half hours—I think without even taking a breath. It was the usual Castro speech, mostly about why Cuba is amazing and the United States is doomed.

  When he stopped talking, he looked at me—I wasn’t necessarily the most prominent person in the group—and through the translator he asked just one question: “How do you get your hair to stand up that way?” Everybody laughed.

  Even Castro loved the hair.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Every Conversation Is a Curiosity Conversation

  * * *

  “Connection gives meaning to our lives. Connection is why we’re here.”

  —Brené Brown1

  IN THE SPRING OF 1995, we at Imagine Entertainment got a new boss. Like anyone, I wanted to make a good impression. I just wasn’t quite sure how to do that.

  In fact, I haven’t had a boss in the conventional sense in thirty years, someone who could call me up and tell me what to do, someone I had to check in with every few days. Ron Howard and I had been running Imagine together—along with a lot of other people—since 1986.

  During that time, we’ve had our longest partnership with Universal Studios—they finance and distribute many of the movies we produce. So I consider whoever is running Universal my “boss” in the sense that we need to work well with that person, we need to develop and sustain a strong personal and professional relationship so we can agree on the kinds of movies we’re making together. Tens of millions of dollars are always hanging in the balance.

  By the mid-1990s, we’d done a run of movies with Universal that were both great and successful: Parenthood (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Backdraft (1991), and The Paper (1994).

  When Lew Wasserman was running Universal, I wanted to know Lew—beyond my youthful encounter where he gave me the pencil and the legal pad.

  When the Japanese electronics company Matsushita bought Universal, I got to know Matsushita executive Tsuzo Murase.

  And when Matsushita sold Universal to the Seagram Company in 1995—yes, Universal Studios went from being independent, to being owned by a Japanese electronics company, to being owned by a Canadian liquor company—I wanted to know Seagram’s CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

  I didn’t hear from Bronfman during the first few weeks after the deal was announced. I did hear that Bronfman had called Steven Spielberg and director and producer Ivan Reitman. So I wondered what to do.

  I was a movie producer, producing lots of movies with what had suddenly become Bronfman’s company.

  Edgar Bronfman was the CEO of a company then doing $6.4 billion in business a year. I wasn’t quite sure how to reach out.

  Should I call his office?

  Should I send an email?

  Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, is a close friend who once gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me. In the right circumstances, he said, “Doing nothing can be a very powerful action unto itself.”

  Iger has years of experience in high-risk, high-pressure situations. These days, in the space of seventy-two hours, he can be in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, then in London on the set of the new Star Wars movie, then in China working at Shanghai Disney, and then back home in Los Angeles at one of his kids’ basketball games. That same weekend, he can return eager to talk about the eighteen-hundred-page biography of Winston Churchill that he finished reading during all his travels. Bob’s insistence on excellence, and his own wide-ranging curiosity, are tireless.

  As I was thinking about how to approach Bronfman, Bob’s advice occurred to me. I tend to think that action is the way to get action on something. I know how to be patient, but I don’t usually leave things alone. I nudge them along. At least, that’s how I operated in the first years of my career. This time I decided to wait. To take no action.

  “Doing nothing can be a very powerful action unto itself.”

  Then the White House called, and solved the problem for me.

  That spring we were getting ready to release Apollo 13 for a summer premiere—it was set to open June 30, 1995, in 2,200 theaters. In May, we got a call from the White House, inviting us to show the movie to President Bill Clinton, his family, and guests three weeks before it was released, on June 8, in the White House screening room.

  That’s how a White House movie screening works—the movie itself is invited to the White House, and all the people responsible for making it get to come along.

  So Tom Hanks was going to the Apollo 13 screening at the White House, along with his wife, Rita Wilson, and so was the NASA astronaut that Hanks portrayed, Jim Lovell. The film’s director, Ron Howard, was going, and as the producer, I was going too. Also invited: Ron Meyer, the head of Universal Studios, and Edgar Bronfman, the CEO of the company that owned Universal.

  What could be more perfect?

  My movie gets invited to the White House—perhaps the most prestigious single movie screen in the whole country. And my new boss at Universal gets to be a guest at the White House, not just to see my movie, but because of my movie.

  That’s about as great an introduction to the boss as you could want.

  It was my first time at the White House. The night started with a cocktail reception. Bronfman was there. President Clinton and Hillary joined us (Chelsea didn’t), some senators and congressmen, a cabinet secretary or two.

  After the cocktails, we all stepped into the White House screening room, which is surprisingly small, just sixty seats. They served popcorn; it was very homey, not fancy at all.

  President Clinton sat through the whole movie. And as it ended, at the moment when NASA Mission Control reestablished radio contact with the returning Apollo capsule, as the familiar trio of orange-and-white parachutes popped out on the TV screens in Mission Control, the screening room burst into applause.

  It was, as I expected, a great setting to meet Edgar Bronfman. A lot of people were competing for his attention that night, of course, but we talked for a few minutes. Bronfman, tall and lanky, is very elegant, and extremely well mannered. “I love this movie,” he told me. “I’m so proud of this.”

  He was just a few weeks into owning Universal, but you could tell how genuinely excited he was about the movie business. He came out to Los Angeles three weeks later for the official premiere of Apollo 13 with his wife, Clarissa. The White House screening was the start of a friendship, and a working relationship, that lasted through the five years that Edgar owned and ran Universal as part of Seagram.

  It was my first time meeting President Clinton, and as so many other people have related from their experience, President Clinton seemed to make a point of connecting with me—a connection that continues to this day. President Clinton clearly appreciated the spirit of Apollo 13, the way the movie captures the NASA engineers and astronauts turning a potential disaster into a triumph of American ingenuity.

  President Clinton later became a big fan of the TV show 24, which premiered after his second term ended. From his perspective, he told me, 24 had a special emotional punch. He said the show captured a lot of the details of intelligence and counterterrorism work accurately—and that in the end, Jack Bauer always nails the bad guy. In real life, he told me, the president and the country’s intelligence and defense staff are often tangled in bureaucracy and legal limitations and red tape, not to mention uncertainty. For President Clinton, 24 is a wish-fulfillment experience: sometimes, he said, it would have been nice to move with the boldness and independence of Jack Bauer.

  • • •

  IN WRITING ABOUT CURIOSITY so far, I’ve tried to tease apart the kinds of curiosity—we’ve tried to granularize it, to create a taxonomy of thinking about, classifying, and using it.

  As a tool for discovery, as a kind of secret weapon to understand what other people don’t.

  As a spark for creativity and inspiration.

  As a way of motivating yourself.

  As
a tool for independence and self-confidence.

  As the key to storytelling.

  As a form of courage.

  But I think the most valuable use of curiosity is one we haven’t explored yet. In fact, I had only recently stumbled into this quality of curiosity—or at least, stumbled into recognizing it. It’s so obvious that when I say it, you may briefly roll your eyes. But it’s also hidden: it’s a kind of curiosity that we neglect and overlook more than the others, even though it has the most power to improve our lives, the lives of those closest to us, and the lives of those we work with every day. I’m talking about the human connection that is created by curiosity.

  Human connection is the most important element of our daily lives—with our colleagues and bosses, our romantic partners, our children, our friends.

  Human connection requires sincerity. It requires compassion. It requires trust.

  Can you really have sincerity, or compassion, or trust, without curiosity?

  I don’t think so. I think when you stop to consider it—when you look at your own experiences at work and at home—what’s so clear is that authentic human connection requires curiosity.

  To be a good boss, you have to be curious about the people who work for you. And to be a good colleague, a good romantic partner, a good parent, you have to be curious as well.

  True love requires curiosity, and sustaining that love requires sustaining your curiosity. Real intimacy requires curiosity.

  I use curiosity every day to help manage people at work, not just in all the ways we’ve talked about, but as a tool to build trust and cooperation and engagement.

  I use curiosity every day with my fiancée and my kids and my friends—not always as skillfully as I would like, I confess—but I use curiosity to keep my relationships vital and fresh, to keep connected.

  Human connection is the most important part of being alive. It’s the key to sustained happiness and to a sense of satisfaction with how you’re living.

  And curiosity is the key to connecting and staying connected.

  I had a meeting on the couches in my office not too long ago with one of my movie production executives.

  She had come in to talk about the state of a movie we’re working on, with a cast of big-name movie stars, and a series of intertwining stories.

  The meeting was short, really just a progress report. Many movies bump and grind along for a lot of months, and a lot of meetings, before either landing on the theater screen, or running out of energy and simply never getting made.

  This particular movie had been in the works for more than a year already, but not a scene had been shot.

  I listened to the update for a few minutes before gently interrupting. “Why should we do this movie?” I asked. “Why are we doing this movie?”

  My colleague stopped and looked at me. She’d been at Imagine a long time and knew me pretty well. She answered my question by simply reciting how we got into this movie, in brisk shorthand—who brought it to us, why it was exciting at that moment.

  I knew all that. And she knew I knew it. She was answering the question of why we were doing this movie, but she wasn’t answering the question of why we should do this movie.

  A few minutes later, I tried again.

  “Do you love this movie?” I asked.

  She smiled. She didn’t shake her head, but she might as well have. Without saying a word, her smile said: Do I love this movie? What kind of question is that? I love the idea of getting this movie made after all these meetings, all these negotiations, all these changes in cast and schedule—that’s what I love.

  She slipped my question like a boxer side-stepping a punch. Love? What’s love? This movie is in the ditch at the moment. We loved it once: loved the idea, loved the cast, loved the package, loved the mood we were going to create for the Friday night movie crowds . . . a year ago. Now the movie just needed to be winched out of the ditch. Who knew whether we loved it anymore? We couldn’t possibly love it until we saw some of it on a screen.

  I just nodded.

  My colleague ticked off a couple of other things—she is well organized and typically comes to my office with a list of the things she needs to make sure we talk about. When she was done with her list, she whisked off.

  I hadn’t told her what to do about the stalled movie.

  And she hadn’t asked what to do about the stalled movie.

  But she very clearly knew how I felt about it. I didn’t love it anymore. I couldn’t really remember loving it that much. I thought it had become a burden, taking time and energy and emotion we should have been putting into projects we really did love.

  But here’s a key element of my personality: I don’t like to boss people around. I don’t get motivated by telling people what to do, I don’t take any pleasure in it.

  So I manage with curiosity by asking questions.

  I actually do it instinctively now. I don’t need to stop and remind myself to ask questions instead of giving instructions. Work these days for many people is filled with one meeting or conversation or conference call after another. In a typical day, I may have fifty conversations of some substance. But I so prefer hearing what other people have to say, that I instinctively ask questions. If you’re listening to my side of a phone call, you may hear little but the occasional question.

  My sense is that most managers and bosses, and most workplaces, don’t work that way.

  Sometimes you have to give orders.

  Sometimes I have to give orders.

  But if you set aside the routine instructions that are part of everyone’s workday—the request to get someone on the phone, to look up a fact, to schedule a meeting—I almost always start with questions.

  I especially think questions are a great management tool when I think someone isn’t doing what I would hope they would, or when I think something isn’t going in the direction I want it to go.

  People often imagine that if there’s going to be conflict, they need to start with a firm hand, they need to remind people of the chain of command.

  I’m never worried about who is in charge.

  I’m worried about making sure we get the best possible decision, the best possible casting, script, movie trailer, financing deal, the best possible movie.

  Asking questions elicits information, of course.

  Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that the boss, or their colleagues, may not know about.

  Asking questions gives people the chance to tell a different story than the one you’re expecting.

  Most important from my perspective is asking questions means people have to make their case for the way they want a decision to go.

  The movie business is all about being able to “make your case.” With Splash, I had to make my case hundreds of times over seven years. After thirty years of successfully making movies, that hasn’t changed for me. In the summer of 2014, we produced the movie Get On Up, the story of James Brown and his monumental impact on the music we listen to every day. Tate Taylor, who directed The Help, directed the film. Mick Jagger coproduced. Chad Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in the movie 42, starred as James Brown.

  I worked for years to make a movie about James Brown and his music. His story is so elemental, so American. It wasn’t just that James Brown came from poverty, that he cut through discrimination—his childhood was devastating, he was abandoned by both his mother and his father and raised in a brothel. He didn’t have much basic education, and no formal musical education. And yet he created a whole new sound in music, a sound that is irresistible. He created a whole new way of performing on stage. James Brown had to be totally self-reliant, totally self-created. His impact on American music is profound. But he paid a huge price. His is a story about finding identity and self-worth. It’s a story of great triumph and also sadness, for him and for those closest to him.

  I’d been interested in James Brown’s music and his life for twenty years. I worked
with James Brown himself on doing a movie for eight years—buying the rights to his life, trying to get the story and the script right, meeting with him over and over. But when he died in 2006 before we had gotten a movie made, the rights to his story reverted to his estate. I was discouraged. We had to start all over.

  I knew Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, a little bit—I’d met him several times. Mick was as passionate about the power of James Brown’s music and story as I was. After Brown died, Mick called me up. “Let’s make this movie together,” he said. He knew I had a working script. He said he would try to renegotiate the rights.

  And then we had to go make the case, again, to Universal Pictures—which had already lost money during my first round trying to get a James Brown movie made.

  Mick and I went to see Donna Langley, the head of Universal Pictures. She’s English and grew up adoring the Rolling Stones. It was a fantastic meeting. Mick is so graceful, so relaxed, so eloquent. He talked to Donna about James Brown, about the script, about the kind of movie we wanted to make. All in that classic Mick Jagger accent. He made it fun. He made it appealing.

  And it worked. Still, after I’d been in the movie business thirty-five years, after I’d won an Oscar, putting Get On Up on the screen took sixteen years—and I needed Mick Jagger’s help to make it happen.

  So if you’re going to survive in Hollywood—and I think if you’re going to survive and thrive anywhere in business—you have to learn to “make the case” for whatever you want to do. Making the case means answering the big questions: Why this project? Why now? Why with this group of talent? With this investment of money? Who is the audience (or the customer)? How will we capture that audience, that customer?

  And the biggest question of all—the question I’m always pulling back to the center of the conversation: What’s the story? What’s this movie about?