Speaker 1: As a listener of how I work.
Speaker 2: You've hopefully picked up a few tips on this show
Speaker 2: to help you work better?
Speaker 1: But do you want more?
Speaker 2: And maybe in a book form, because let's face it,
Speaker 2: books are the most awesome thing on the planet. Well,
Speaker 2: now you can. In my new book, time Wise, I
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Speaker 1: July five, but you can pre order it now from
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Speaker 1: I have a couple of bonuses for you.
Speaker 2: First, you'll receive an ebook that details my top twenty
Speaker 2: favorite apps and software for being time wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading,
Speaker 2: cooking ideas, and more. You will also get a complimentary
Speaker 2: spot in a webinar that I'm running on June twenty nine,
Speaker 2: where I will be sharing the tactics from time Wise
Speaker 2: that I use most often, and also some bonus ones
Speaker 2: that are not in the book That I Use and Love.
Speaker 2: Hop onto Amantha dot Com to pre order. Now It's
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven. An American university student is helping to
Speaker 2: organize a protest rally at school and is told to
Speaker 2: visit a little coffeehouse called Cappuccino. He does, and as
Speaker 2: the crowd falls silent in wait, and as yet undiscovered
Speaker 2: protest songwriter named Tracy Chapman takes the stage.
Speaker 1: That student was.
Speaker 2: Brian Koppleman, who would go on to executive produce Chapman's
Speaker 2: first album, Yes, the one with Fast Car on it.
Speaker 2: But being an exec even in the music business, wasn't
Speaker 2: Brian's dream. He wanted to be a writer, and so
Speaker 2: with his best friend and co writer David Levine, Brian
Speaker 2: holdaway in the basement to write his first screenplay, Rounders,
Speaker 2: and has since written, produced, and directed a number of
Speaker 2: critically acclaimed films. He's now one of the showrunners of
Speaker 2: the hit TV show Billions.
Speaker 1: Brian's also obsessed with how creatives do their work.
Speaker 2: He hosts The Moment, a podcast about what makes creative
Speaker 2: people tick and how they turn their inspiration into art.
Speaker 2: But what about the working life of Brian The creator
Speaker 2: of so many shows and movies that millions of people
Speaker 2: all over the world have loved. We dig into what
Speaker 2: makes Brian tick at work, covering everything from his morning
Speaker 2: page's richel to his writing routines to becoming a producer
Speaker 2: and a showrunner. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm
Speaker 2: an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy
Speaker 2: Invent Him, And this is how I work, a show
Speaker 2: about how to help you do your best work. Brian
Speaker 2: has held a number of job titles in the movie
Speaker 2: and TV business.
Speaker 1: At any one time, he's been.
Speaker 2: A showrunner, a screenwriter, a director, and a producer. But
Speaker 2: it started with writing, writing in a basement with nobody
Speaker 2: but his co writer, working on a movie called Rounders.
Speaker 2: So what did that very first screenwriting process look like?
Speaker 3: It was so hard one because I was a blocked
Speaker 3: writer for so long. And what that really means is
Speaker 3: I wasn't being a writer and something in me was
Speaker 3: quite dissatisfied with myself, really, And so I will tell
Speaker 3: you that when I finally broke through and found a
Speaker 3: way to produce work, it meant so much to me.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll just back up and tell you, you know,
Speaker 3: I was thirty years old, twenty nine thirty. I was,
Speaker 3: you know, moving along in a career that was going well,
Speaker 3: but something inside me felt like it was dying. And
Speaker 3: this really came to a head when Amy and I
Speaker 3: had our first child, and I wanted to be the
Speaker 3: kind of person who would tell his kid to chase
Speaker 3: their dreams. And somewhere in me I knew I wasn't.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't a commercial dream, it wasn't a market
Speaker 3: center dream. It was about creating something. It was about
Speaker 3: taking the risk to be some kind of an artist.
Speaker 3: And I had this thought that if you allow a
Speaker 3: creative death is like any other kind of death. And
Speaker 3: if I allowed that creative spark to die, it would
Speaker 3: become toxic and it would ooze onto the people I loved,
Speaker 3: and it would become I might become bitter. I might
Speaker 3: become exactly the kind of person I didn't want to be.
Speaker 3: And that's sort of what drove me to do this.
Speaker 3: And so to answer question, when I was finally doing
Speaker 3: the work, Amy cleared out a storage space underneath our apartment,
Speaker 3: a basement in New York City. The storage space was
Speaker 3: a tiny little at a slop sync in it basically
Speaker 3: room for one chair at a half a desk, and
Speaker 3: I would sit on the floor. My partner, Dave, who
Speaker 3: I do all this stuff you just named with, he
Speaker 3: would type in that first one mostly, and in two
Speaker 3: hours every morning we met and we wrote that script.
Speaker 3: And those two hours I felt so alive during those
Speaker 3: two hours of the day that it actually allowed me
Speaker 3: to be much better the rest of the day. Those
Speaker 3: two hours, and they were hard, right, learning to really
Speaker 3: be a writer and really write a screenplay and sort
Speaker 3: of approached that with an incredible rigor. It was really challenging,
Speaker 3: but I felt so much like I was becoming the
Speaker 3: person I wanted to be that when I would leave
Speaker 3: there and then have to go to my job and
Speaker 3: go to meetings, I was so much better because I
Speaker 3: was able to engage. Almost like you'd gone to the gym,
Speaker 3: and once you put in a really rigorous and ritualistic
Speaker 3: kind of a workout routine, it kind of like sets
Speaker 3: you up for the rest of the day, And that
Speaker 3: set me up for the rest of the day.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering, how much do you remember about what happened
Speaker 2: in those two hours every day, Like, how would you start,
Speaker 2: how would those first five minutes work.
Speaker 3: One thing we did that turned out to be lucky.
Speaker 3: I think that I would say it was a smart
Speaker 3: thing to do, but really we were feeling our way
Speaker 3: through it. So I don't know how much of it
Speaker 3: was that we were smart about it. But we outlined
Speaker 3: the script, and what that looked like was before we
Speaker 3: got in that room, we were meeting, and maybe we'd
Speaker 3: meet at a diner when I got off work or
Speaker 3: something like that, or in a morning before I went
Speaker 3: to work, when Dave got off bartending shift, and we
Speaker 3: would kind of talk through what this story might be.
Speaker 3: And you know, I had walked into a poker club
Speaker 3: late one night and played cards and realized that was this.
Speaker 3: Dave and I've been talking a writing movie, and that's
Speaker 3: probably where we set it around. But we would really
Speaker 3: talk about, you know what, how do we want to
Speaker 3: tell this story about the New York poker underground. Who
Speaker 3: were the characters. So we did a lot of work
Speaker 3: ahead of time on thinking about who these characters were,
Speaker 3: what they wanted, and what kind of obstacles would be
Speaker 3: in their way. And so we did that work for
Speaker 3: a long while and then the first day we went
Speaker 3: and began turning that outline into a screenplay. We had
Speaker 3: weren't meeting that very first day. We didn't meet in
Speaker 3: the storage space that Amy cleaned out that first day.
Speaker 3: It was Columbus Day, which is a holiday in America,
Speaker 3: and we so my office was closed that day, so
Speaker 3: we met in my office and that day we had
Speaker 3: a yellow legal pad and we were the only people
Speaker 3: in the It was big office, and we were the
Speaker 3: only people there that in the whole place. And we
Speaker 3: spent that day probably three hours, and we wrote the
Speaker 3: first eight nine ten pages of Rounders, fairly close to
Speaker 3: what it ended up being. And so then when we
Speaker 3: would go into the room, we were adding on to that,
Speaker 3: and we would try to write a scene or two
Speaker 3: scenes a day. We would talk through We had an outline,
Speaker 3: so we knew, well, this scene's supposed to sort of
Speaker 3: be like this, and then we would talk to each
Speaker 3: other about what the spark in the scene might be,
Speaker 3: what the conflict in the scene might be. I might
Speaker 3: tell Dave some story about something that happened in a
Speaker 3: poker room I was at once. He would maybe tell
Speaker 3: me about an argument he witnessed, and then we would
Speaker 3: set to writing. And on the first one he typed
Speaker 3: most of the time would I would sit on that thing,
Speaker 3: but most mostly then I would stand when we were
Speaker 3: actually writing, I would be standing up kind of behind them,
Speaker 3: leaning forward, and we would just kind of talk out
Speaker 3: the scenes to each other. And I'd say we did
Speaker 3: that for four months and then had the script, and
Speaker 3: then I would and then the other part of it
Speaker 3: is at night. You know, we would take it home
Speaker 3: on floppy disks. Back then, this is nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 3: ninety seven, you know, we're writing on a little computer
Speaker 3: with floppies, and I would take the floppy disk home
Speaker 3: and put in my computer at home, my desktop computer
Speaker 3: at home. I would print out those pages and I
Speaker 3: would read through what we did and make little notes.
Speaker 3: And then the next day maybe perhaps we would start
Speaker 3: with oh, these little shifts, and then we would we
Speaker 3: would move forward. And I remember David had written a
Speaker 3: manuscript before and us screenplay before, so he understood better
Speaker 3: than I did that the pain was worth fighting through.
Speaker 3: Like maybe we'd get to an hour in and if
Speaker 3: a scene wasn't coming, I would be like, well, let's
Speaker 3: pick a up here tomorrow. And he sort of taught
Speaker 3: me in a way that I've kept to this day,
Speaker 3: which is no, you get to the end of the scene,
Speaker 3: you can fix it tomorrow. But we're going to get
Speaker 3: to the end of the scene now.
Speaker 2: When Brounders went into production, your screenwriting career began in
Speaker 2: earnest and you've said that it also served as a
Speaker 2: crash course in film school.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me what you mean by that.
Speaker 3: We were invited to be on set every day of
Speaker 3: the making of the film, and that was because we
Speaker 3: had kind of taken it upon ourselves to find the
Speaker 3: right director for the movie, which was not in our
Speaker 3: job so portfolio at all. That's the purview of the producer,
Speaker 3: but we didn't want to leave it to the fates.
Speaker 3: And we were just young enough but not too young,
Speaker 3: just young enough really to unders to try to do
Speaker 3: it ourselves, and through a series of things we were
Speaker 3: able to so in a way, since we brought the
Speaker 3: director to the party, he then extended back to us
Speaker 3: the invitation. And because we were expert in the story,
Speaker 3: we were expert in poker in a way that nobody
Speaker 3: else was, and we were around the same age as
Speaker 3: the lead actors, and so we realized we had the
Speaker 3: opportunity to be on set every day we consciously decided
Speaker 3: to treat it like film school, meaning we decided we
Speaker 3: were going to ask questions, not willing nilly and not
Speaker 3: sort of while people were trying to do their jobs.
Speaker 3: But if I wanted to understand what the cinematographer was
Speaker 3: thinking about, I would ask at lunchtime, or I would
Speaker 3: ask at the end of the day, or I would say,
Speaker 3: can we have dinner. The director John Dall, who's someone
Speaker 3: we work very closely with to this day. He directs
Speaker 3: on both of our shows, and he's a dear friend
Speaker 3: to this day. John was really great about explaining stuff
Speaker 3: to us. I'm staging the scene this way because it's
Speaker 3: from this point of view, and if we stage it
Speaker 3: from here in the camp are here, it sort of
Speaker 3: demonstrates that. And he would kind of walk us through
Speaker 3: that and walk us through first principles of how to
Speaker 3: think about staging and shooting a scene. And because it
Speaker 3: was happening in front of us and we were a
Speaker 3: part of it and questions would come to us about
Speaker 3: the intention of a scene or about a line, we
Speaker 3: were really a part of making that movie. But we
Speaker 3: were also getting.
Speaker 2: Our education that that's quite unusual to be writers on
Speaker 2: a set, Like, what sort of other insights do you
Speaker 2: feel like you got as a writer at that stage
Speaker 2: in your career that you just wouldn't have got had
Speaker 2: you not been on set every day.
Speaker 3: Well, a huge one, I mean really learning how to
Speaker 3: talk to actors.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I had acted in college, I had directed plays. I
Speaker 3: knew a bit about that, but the time pressure of
Speaker 3: a film or a television show, the stakes because of
Speaker 3: how much money everybody's spending, the various egos, So learning
Speaker 3: how how to manage that relationship with the artist who's
Speaker 3: going to translate your work is really important. Then some
Speaker 3: of that is watching. Some of that is engaging and
Speaker 3: having it go well, or engaging and realizing you didn't
Speaker 3: really know exactly what to say, or you didn't know
Speaker 3: how to listen correctly, and also learning how not to
Speaker 3: hold on too tight, how to if you know what
Speaker 3: the scene needs to do and an actor has another
Speaker 3: way to get there, knowing that you can hear the
Speaker 3: actor out, and if you're willing to listen in a
Speaker 3: posture of calm, genuinely not just a pie, if you're
Speaker 3: genuinely willing to listen for the better idea. Actors are
Speaker 3: so highly attuned emotionally, that they can feel that they
Speaker 3: can feel you're not defensive. And then if the better
Speaker 3: idea is to steer them back to the original idea,
Speaker 3: they're very willing to go there. And those are all
Speaker 3: things that someone can tell you, but until you're there
Speaker 3: doing it. And also you realize how much stuff you
Speaker 3: can cut out, because how much stuff can just get
Speaker 3: accomplished by the way an actor looks in another actor
Speaker 3: you know on the page for your first screenplay. Everybody,
Speaker 3: I think wants to make sure nothing is missed. I
Speaker 3: want to make sure I communicate everything, and so you
Speaker 3: might put too much in the scene. But when you're
Speaker 3: standing there and you're looking on the monitor through the
Speaker 3: camera you're watching, and you see two actors meet eyes,
Speaker 3: it can almost be wordless sometimes, and that's a great
Speaker 3: look I love for both characters. I love characters who
Speaker 3: speak in bursts of dialogue. But I also know what
Speaker 3: the limits of that are. And that can only happen
Speaker 3: if you've been part of shooting and editing something.
Speaker 2: That's been about twenty five years since you and David
Speaker 2: wrote Rounders, and I'm curious what does your writing process
Speaker 2: look like now, Like, what have you kept from those
Speaker 2: original days in the basement to now that you guys,
Speaker 2: I guess are working most actively on Billions.
Speaker 3: What we've kept is that the story itself is still
Speaker 3: something that we like to work out together with a
Speaker 3: bigger group of people. You know, we have someone who's
Speaker 3: come in and helped on both Super Pumped and Billions.
Speaker 3: Beth Shackter is a woman who's become a partner helping
Speaker 3: us show run both shows, and so she'll sit with us,
Speaker 3: and we have a writer's staff as well. But if
Speaker 3: it's an episode that David and I are writing ourselves,
Speaker 3: we'll take some input from people and talk stuff through,
Speaker 3: and then the two of us will talk about the
Speaker 3: story a lot, and then we'll start passing documents back
Speaker 3: and forth. We don't write over the screen together anymore,
Speaker 3: rotating who's typing. We write separately, but together. We'll sometimes
Speaker 3: be in the same room, but I'll be at my
Speaker 3: desk and he'll be at his. So we'll outline an
Speaker 3: episode together. We know what the story is, and then
Speaker 3: we will break up the scenes in half and you know,
Speaker 3: just kind of rotating them. We'll put our initials throughout,
Speaker 3: like one of us will just put DLBK, DLBK, and
Speaker 3: then we'll write our scenes and then we kind of rotate.
Speaker 3: We'll put them into a master document, and one of
Speaker 3: us will go first and rewrite the whole document, and
Speaker 3: then the other person will go and rewrite the whole document,
Speaker 3: and then we'll send notes back to one another. I
Speaker 3: mean the You know, David's been my best friend since
Speaker 3: we're fourteen fifteen years old, so we're like brothers, but
Speaker 3: without any of the baggage of having been raised by
Speaker 3: the same people in the same home. So it's a
Speaker 3: very easy relationship in terms of our ability to communicate
Speaker 3: about these matters.
Speaker 2: So when you're going off to write your own pages,
Speaker 2: your own parts of the scripts, can you talk me
Speaker 2: through what that process looks like.
Speaker 3: Yes, I and it's a bit different. Pre and post
Speaker 3: pandemic took me through both. So pre pandemic, I guess
Speaker 3: are two main ways. One is I love to write
Speaker 3: on a couch. If I can be on a couch
Speaker 3: with a laptop in my lap and my big head
Speaker 3: and at home, if I'm on a couch, I don't
Speaker 3: need headphones necessarily. I can have music playing on the stereo.
Speaker 3: I always have to have music playing, or ninety nine
Speaker 3: percent of the time I have music playing when I'm writing,
Speaker 3: and I try to I have to pair the music
Speaker 3: with the scene I'm writing in some way. It has
Speaker 3: to it has to relate to what I'm writing, either
Speaker 3: in counterpoint to it or supporting it.
Speaker 2: Oh, can you give me a couple of examples of that,
Speaker 2: Like how you pay music to sing?
Speaker 3: Well, it's all throughout the show. I mean, it's all
Speaker 3: throughout everything that we do. Like when you hear the
Speaker 3: music on the show, a lot of the time, that's
Speaker 3: music that was written into the script because I was
Speaker 3: writing to that music. Wow, and those things are you know.
Speaker 3: I guess a key example would be Tom Petty's Even
Speaker 3: the Losers, like I was writing, which is a central
Speaker 3: song to episode eleven of the second season of Billions,
Speaker 3: And I mean I just remember writing and writing to
Speaker 3: that song and then realizing that song would take us
Speaker 3: through the whole episode and it had thematic unity with
Speaker 3: the episode. And I would say that's constantly happening. Again,
Speaker 3: not every episode or every scene, but very very often
Speaker 3: that's the way that that happens. And for David as well,
Speaker 3: he doesn't write with music as much, but he's thinking
Speaker 3: about it too, and the other way that I'll write.
Speaker 3: So it's a couch. But I also really like There's
Speaker 3: a restaurant in my neighborhood in New York called Red Farm,
Speaker 3: and it's a Chinese restaurant and the owner just passed away,
Speaker 3: but he was a dear friend and I would go
Speaker 3: into the restaurant many weekends. So during the week I
Speaker 3: might be on a couch on set somewhere. I always
Speaker 3: have a couch at my office so that I can
Speaker 3: write on it. And we have a bunch of offices
Speaker 3: depending on what stages were on to shoot the shows.
Speaker 3: But on weekends, which is when I do a lot
Speaker 3: of the writing, especially if we're in season, I would
Speaker 3: go to the Red Farm, this restaurant. I would get
Speaker 3: at small booth. I would get a big pot of
Speaker 3: oolong tea and I would just sit there and put
Speaker 3: my headphones on and write. And you know, I write
Speaker 3: in about two hour bursts, usually still, and then take
Speaker 3: a walk. And you know, if it's there's a deadline,
Speaker 3: perhaps I'll go to Red Farm right for a couple hours.
Speaker 3: You know, I probably start at home right on the couch,
Speaker 3: then feel like okay, change the scenery, go walk over
Speaker 3: to Red Farm, which is just a five minute walk,
Speaker 3: sit there for a couple hours, and then you know,
Speaker 3: perhaps by then that would be it for the day,
Speaker 3: or I'd come back into another hour at home. And
Speaker 3: the best part of it is when you're kind of
Speaker 3: not aware of any of that when you're working. And
Speaker 3: when I'm working and I feel hyper present and at
Speaker 3: the same time barely tethered to the ground. I'm just
Speaker 3: somehow existing this ether that's betwixt and between and I'm
Speaker 3: hardly aware of what's happening between the music and the
Speaker 3: tea and the you know, spices of the food or whatever.
Speaker 3: I'm just in a different place. And obviously I can
Speaker 3: do that without tea or without uh, you know, spices,
Speaker 3: And that's you know, that's the that's the joy, that's
Speaker 3: the kind of the the pleasure of doing this. Because
Speaker 3: the story part is very hard, uh. The part of
Speaker 3: outlining and breaking story and and and for me anyway
Speaker 3: is hard.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: But the writing of scenes once that work has been done,
Speaker 3: meaning the actual writing of the dialogue and figuring it out,
Speaker 3: and that may mean changing story too as you're going.
Speaker 3: That part is the part that is what makes me
Speaker 3: willing to do all the other work. That's the part
Speaker 3: that's the kind of even when it's very difficult, it's
Speaker 3: kind of pure joy.
Speaker 1: What makes the story part so difficult.
Speaker 3: I think I'm working from different parts of my brain
Speaker 3: when I'm breaking the story parts really analytical and like math,
Speaker 3: and I hate math. Writing the dialogue is like painting
Speaker 3: or something you know, or like playing the guitar and
Speaker 3: writing a song. It's a it's it's for me. That's
Speaker 3: the part that feels like I'm unleashed, whereas the other
Speaker 3: part feels like if I'm doing it right, it just
Speaker 3: requires so much rigor and focus.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting.
Speaker 2: And so like with the I guess with that flow
Speaker 2: state that you described, when you're writing dialogue working on scenes,
Speaker 2: do you find it easy to just switch into that gear,
Speaker 2: like when you've got your music on and you're at
Speaker 2: the restaurant or you're on a couch.
Speaker 1: Does that flow state come to you quite quickly?
Speaker 3: Yes? I mean I don't want to really say that,
Speaker 3: but yes, I mean, like getting to sit down there.
Speaker 3: I have bad adhd, you know, really diagnosed bad adhd,
Speaker 3: and so getting to this sitting down is fucking hard.
Speaker 3: For me. But once I'm doing it, then that part
Speaker 3: of it. If that part of it isn't going, then
Speaker 3: the other parts weren't done right, then the story's fucked up.
Speaker 3: Or then the actual project isn't what I should be
Speaker 3: working on because I'm not connected to it. But yeah,
Speaker 3: the part of it where mak making characters, talk, moving
Speaker 3: them around a setting, imagining what's going to all that
Speaker 3: stuff is pleasurable to me. It's hard, but it's pleasurable.
Speaker 3: And it's you don't always I mean, I would say,
Speaker 3: you know, you don't always get into that level of
Speaker 3: flow state that I'm describing. That's the part that that's
Speaker 3: the part that makes it all worth doing. But it
Speaker 3: is relative. The more I've done this, the more or
Speaker 3: that it happens. And it is relatively easy to fall
Speaker 3: into that space.
Speaker 2: So you said getting to the couch though, that's the
Speaker 2: challenging part. So what tricks have you found to get
Speaker 2: yourself to the couch to start writing?
Speaker 3: I mean, the morning pages are the best trick in
Speaker 3: the world, right. Julia Cameron describes them in the artist's way,
Speaker 3: and that's the life changer for me. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: the thing I did at thirty to figure it out.
Speaker 3: And it's still the thing. I mean, I still do
Speaker 3: that every morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: For those that are not familiar with morning pages, and
Speaker 2: I must say I've experimented with them myself. Can you
Speaker 2: talk about what your process for doing morning pages is.
Speaker 1: I find some people sort of tweak it a little bit.
Speaker 3: I do not. I do it exactly as Julia Cameron describes.
Speaker 3: The only tweak, sorry, the only tweak is I meditate first.
Speaker 3: And I asked Julia when she was on my podcast,
Speaker 3: and she'd prefer if I did the pages first and
Speaker 3: then meditate it. But so I do meditate first. But
Speaker 3: then the next thing I do in my day is
Speaker 3: I open a journal and I write three long hand
Speaker 3: pages and I just do not stop my pen from moving.
Speaker 3: I don't race through it, but I'm I'm keeping my
Speaker 3: so I take a breath and I'm in it. I'm
Speaker 3: aware of what I'm doing, but I am just allowing
Speaker 3: myself to write. Any thought that comes down, I will
Speaker 3: not stop moving the pen, and I don't read it over.
Speaker 3: You know, if an idea comes up during it that
Speaker 3: I think is useful for something, some creative project or something,
Speaker 3: I'll immediately transfer it, but then I do not go
Speaker 3: back to those pages, as she says, don't go back
Speaker 3: for five years, or maybe never go back. And it
Speaker 3: is a way to get your subconscious going. It kind
Speaker 3: of I think of it as tipping my subconscious out
Speaker 3: onto the page. It also gets rid of the detritus. Man,
Speaker 3: it's like the I think it's like the mental equivalent
Speaker 3: of drinking the water first thing in the morning and rehydrating.
Speaker 3: I somehow just feel better having done it. So that
Speaker 3: and meditation and also walks, like walking helps, exercising helps
Speaker 3: all that stuff that just gets rid of the wanderlust
Speaker 3: or whatever it is that keeps me from doing the work.
Speaker 3: Books sometimes, I mean sometimes I'm picking up the guitar
Speaker 3: and noodling around and putting on music and reading a book.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, straightening up there looking no, I
Speaker 3: don't want to paint a picture. That's impossible to attain. Like,
Speaker 3: it's hard to get yourself to do the work when
Speaker 3: you're someone with ADHD and your job is to produce
Speaker 3: pages and television. It's like a hard for me. You know,
Speaker 3: it's not hard work compared to like real backbreaking work
Speaker 3: that a lot of people do, but for me. That
Speaker 3: stuff's hard, but I've gotten better and better at it
Speaker 3: and it's something I continue to work at. And I
Speaker 3: think also having a partner where I have to deliver
Speaker 3: for him helps because Dave can't hand in the script
Speaker 3: until my part's done right, so I can't be the
Speaker 3: person that's making our team suffer. And like when I
Speaker 3: wrote the one movie that I wrote alone that we made,
Speaker 3: Solitary Man with Michael Douglas, I wrote that by myself
Speaker 3: and it was a much harder process. It was before
Speaker 3: I meditated. That was twenty two thousand and nine. I
Speaker 3: think that we made that movie and I started meditating
Speaker 3: in twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: Maybe that would have helped. But that took me years
Speaker 3: to write that movie, and partially partially, I think because
Speaker 3: it wasn't like, well, Dave's going to have his pages
Speaker 3: done Sunday, so we agreed on that, so I have
Speaker 3: to get mine done Sunday too.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that, yeah, using that like almost like an
Speaker 2: accountability buddy, which which I really something that is a
Speaker 2: lot of quite common amongst guests that I've spoken to.
Speaker 2: We will be back again with Brian soon where we'll
Speaker 2: be talking about where his best ideas come from and
Speaker 2: how he knows whether he has an idea that's even
Speaker 2: worth pursuing. And if you're looking for more tips to
Speaker 2: improve the way you work, I write a short fortnightly
Speaker 2: newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that
Speaker 2: helped me work better. You can sign up for that
Speaker 2: at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot COO. Now,
Speaker 2: the thing that listeners would probably be most familiar with
Speaker 2: in terms of your work is the show Billions. And
Speaker 2: you are what is called a showrunner. And I imagine
Speaker 2: that there are a lot of listeners that have no
Speaker 2: idea what a showrunner is, So can you explain what
Speaker 2: that is?
Speaker 3: What that involves the showrunner on a television series, the
Speaker 3: closest equivalent would be if someone were a director and
Speaker 3: producer on a movie. So the showrunner is responsible for
Speaker 3: overseeing the shooting, the creating, so the writing and the
Speaker 3: shooting and the casting and the editing and the post
Speaker 3: production of the show. And the showrunner is involved in
Speaker 3: overseeing the marketing, you know, dealing with the marketing department
Speaker 3: and approving all their great ideas. Now, we work with
Speaker 3: incredible professionals who run the departments that actually do all
Speaker 3: those jobs or many of those jobs that we don't
Speaker 3: do personally. But we are responsible for delivering the show.
Speaker 3: We're responsible for every aspect of delivering the show, and
Speaker 3: that is so we hire the directors and then it's
Speaker 3: our job to talk to the directors about what the
Speaker 3: show should be like and answer their questions and help them.
Speaker 3: And we have the final cut on the episode, so
Speaker 3: the director doesn't cut, and then we do with our editors,
Speaker 3: and so the showrunner is really the person or people
Speaker 3: charged with safeguarding the tone, spirit of the show and
Speaker 3: the physical shooting of the show.
Speaker 2: Now, you mentioned research before when you're talking about rounders
Speaker 2: and how you know you'd spend a lot of time
Speaker 2: in poker clubs, and I think I've heard for billions
Speaker 2: you hang out with real life billionaires.
Speaker 1: I'd love to know.
Speaker 2: I like, do you have a kind of a specific
Speaker 2: approach that you take when you're researching to try to
Speaker 2: get inside a world?
Speaker 3: Well, an immersive approach for sure. Yeah. I mean it's
Speaker 3: funny when someone writes about it it's hanging out with billionaires.
Speaker 3: I mean it's interviewing them and embedding with them the
Speaker 3: way a journalist might at times, I'm not hanging out
Speaker 3: with them, like certainly in the beginning, by seven years
Speaker 3: into making the TV show, there are a couple of
Speaker 3: people who have achieved that kind of success who I've
Speaker 3: become friendly with and I might go play sports with
Speaker 3: or something like that. That said, even when I'm doing that,
Speaker 3: they know and I know that I'm paying attention. I'm
Speaker 3: not fully losing myself because I'm not them, I'm not
Speaker 3: of them. I'm a different thing. I'm the artist. I'm
Speaker 3: a writer, I'm an observer. We're spending time, but with
Speaker 3: a very clear purpose, and that purpose is to understand.
Speaker 3: I mean, all this goes back to curiosity, which is
Speaker 3: a cornerstone of anybody who wants to write or tell
Speaker 3: stories or be any kind of an artist, I think,
Speaker 3: which is to have tremendous men of curiosity about your subject.
Speaker 3: And so in the poker clubs, I love poker. I
Speaker 3: was pretty obsessed with poker. As soon as I heard
Speaker 3: these people speak though that other people are there there
Speaker 3: just thinking about poker. I'm there and I'm like listening
Speaker 3: to their language, you know, and I'm why do you
Speaker 3: talk that way? What does that mean? How did you
Speaker 3: become you? What got you here? I mean I'm immediately
Speaker 3: just thinking of all those things, like how's this person
Speaker 3: in this basement playing in this game now? Like what
Speaker 3: what does he do when he leaves here? Like how
Speaker 3: does he make peace with what just happened. I'm just
Speaker 3: that's the way that I go through life. You know,
Speaker 3: That's probably why I became a writer, right, And so
Speaker 3: that's when you're doing the research. I mean, that's the process.
Speaker 3: It's books and conversations and going to places and keeping
Speaker 3: your eyes and ears open. It's basic. I think I
Speaker 3: never took a journalism class, but I imagine a lot of
Speaker 3: it is stuff that's taught in a.
Speaker 2: Journalism Now you've been working on Billions for seven years,
Speaker 2: and you're also working on Super Pumped. I want to know,
Speaker 2: like where's the space for new ideas? And I guess,
Speaker 2: like what I'm curious about is like, I'm sure that
Speaker 2: you would get ideas all the time, but how do
Speaker 2: you know when it's an idea that is worth pursuing
Speaker 2: given that your schedule sounds quite busy?
Speaker 3: Curiosity? It comes back to that, right, what keeps me
Speaker 3: engaged and curious and wanting to know more? It's super
Speaker 3: pumped happen because you know, we read this manuscript, this
Speaker 3: book that Mike Isaac wrote, and it spoke to us.
Speaker 3: It was like, we want to know everything about this
Speaker 3: world and we want to and it seemed fascinating. We
Speaker 3: wanted to tell it. So much of this is not intelle.
Speaker 3: You eventually have to apply your intellect to the problem
Speaker 3: in hand, like to prosecute the questions, but the the
Speaker 3: falling in to it is not an intellectual process for
Speaker 3: me anyway. It's an instinctive process. It's a tactile process.
Speaker 3: It's a you know, it's it's about something that kind
Speaker 3: of makes me stay up late and think about it,
Speaker 3: or wake up first thing in the morning and I
Speaker 3: find myself journaling about it, and I find myself sending
Speaker 3: texts to Dave and you know, first thing in the morning,
Speaker 3: or uh, it's not I think from the beginning, it
Speaker 3: wasn't like I walked into a poker club and thought,
Speaker 3: the market wants to see this. I thought, I want
Speaker 3: to immerse myself in this. I want to know everything
Speaker 3: about this. I want to understand these people. Oh fuck,
Speaker 3: this could be a movie. That's the method by which
Speaker 3: I can gain an understanding of this, and if I
Speaker 3: love it and I'm fascinated by maybe other people will
Speaker 3: be too. I think we can make this fucking great.
Speaker 3: If we make it great, maybe this is the way
Speaker 3: we become screenwriters. Like it's very much that's the order
Speaker 3: of if I had to reduce it to thoughts. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's all I can say instinctive, But if I had
Speaker 3: to break into thoughts, that's probably the way I would
Speaker 3: order those thoughts.
Speaker 2: Now, because of everything you've done, I imagine that a
Speaker 2: lot of people approach you for feedback on their work,
Speaker 2: and I'd love to know why when someone asks you
Speaker 2: for feedback you respond with what kind of feedback do
Speaker 2: you want?
Speaker 3: Well, that's only really like fellow professionals, most of the time,
Speaker 3: all I can say is no, I can't hear, I
Speaker 3: can't read, because like the lawyers, truly don't let me,
Speaker 3: and the lawyers basically explain the risk, and I then
Speaker 3: say no, I won't. But let's say somebody who is
Speaker 3: a fellow professional who is represented. I know she won't
Speaker 3: sue me if I read your thing, and then someday
Speaker 3: she thinks, oh, there's a project, you know I wrote
Speaker 3: about a bowling alley. Hey, this thing is about darts.
Speaker 3: I think they stole my idea. But yes, if a
Speaker 3: fellow professional says, will you read, I will say what
Speaker 3: kind of feedback do you want? Because sometimes what somebody
Speaker 3: wants is just encouragement. That's mostly a waste of time.
Speaker 3: But if they want real feedback, if they want me
Speaker 3: to really get in there, I will give them full,
Speaker 3: detailed notes. And that won't always be a pleasant conversation,
Speaker 3: but the hope is it'll lead some We're good and
Speaker 3: I'll tell you my friend, our friend Craig Mason did
Speaker 3: that for us on the Billions pilot script and it
Speaker 3: was invaluable. Our friend l would Read did that too.
Speaker 3: They read the script and Craig gave us. Craig is
Speaker 3: one of the best screenwriters in the business, gave us
Speaker 3: two hours of conversation because he noticed some things. Hey,
Speaker 3: the way you get into this scene is confusing. Let's
Speaker 3: talk about what else you could do to get into it. Hey,
Speaker 3: here's a moment. It would be good to be alone
Speaker 3: with the character and bond and you don't take all
Speaker 3: those ideas. But as the questions get raised, it forces
Speaker 3: you to reevaluate the work. And I try to do
Speaker 3: that for my friends. We do that for each other,
Speaker 3: but civilians can't really take that kind of feedback. They
Speaker 3: don't really want it.
Speaker 2: Now. Feedback, of course, is a request on your time,
Speaker 2: and I would imagine you would get all sorts of
Speaker 2: people reaching out to you to ask you to do
Speaker 2: things like me asking you to be on how I work.
Speaker 2: And I'm curious as to how you make those decisions,
Speaker 2: like what you say yes to and what you say
Speaker 2: no to.
Speaker 3: You I mostly say no no. I like this podcast.
Speaker 3: That's why I did it, and I think it's a
Speaker 3: fascinating subject matter and maybe useful. So like maybe someone
Speaker 3: who wants to be a showrunner a screenwriter, maybe this
Speaker 3: is well. I think about this all the time. A
Speaker 3: couple of things. One, my kids are older now, so
Speaker 3: in some ways it's easier when my kids were younger,
Speaker 3: and I had to really take that into account and
Speaker 3: wanted to take that into account. But if I can
Speaker 3: be playing guitar and writing songs, that's what I want
Speaker 3: to do, So I want to protect that time in reading,
Speaker 3: you know reading. I would say the other thing, like,
Speaker 3: if we go back slightly, the thing that made me
Speaker 3: want to do this to begin with is how much
Speaker 3: I love reading, how much books have given me, and
Speaker 3: I still try to protect enough time to read. I
Speaker 3: still read like a couple books a week, and that's really, really,
Speaker 3: really important to me. So everything gets fit in around
Speaker 3: time I spend with my wife Amy, who is also
Speaker 3: a great filmmaker, writer and novelist, you know, and my
Speaker 3: work responsibilities exercise and you know that, and within that,
Speaker 3: then I try to just pick a few things that
Speaker 3: I'm willing to do.
Speaker 1: What's your approach to saying no, because I imagine, having
Speaker 1: said it so many times, I imagine you probably have
Speaker 1: some different strategies that make saying no easier or quicker
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 3: I try to say no very quickly. What you said
Speaker 3: is exactly right. I try to say no very quickly
Speaker 3: and very directly. I can't do this. I try not
Speaker 3: to say check back with me in six months. If
Speaker 3: I say that, I mean it at the time. I
Speaker 3: try not to say that. I try to really think
Speaker 3: about whether I'll ever do the thing, but I just
Speaker 3: say a quick no. It's not going to I can't
Speaker 3: do that now. I don't really give a huge explanation,
Speaker 3: usually because they want the yes or the no really,
Speaker 3: So I try to be definitive and I try to
Speaker 3: be quickly responsive. I just just happened the other day
Speaker 3: someone asked me, and I just said, they asked me
Speaker 3: for a blurb. I had just read read a book
Speaker 3: and given a blurb to somebody, an older writer I
Speaker 3: read this who wrote an incredible his work had meant
Speaker 3: a lot to me. He asked me to read the book.
Speaker 3: I won't give a blurb if I don't read the book.
Speaker 3: I read the book, and then so happened. I finished that,
Speaker 3: and I got a request from somebody to do a blurb.
Speaker 3: And at first maybe they wrote me a few months ago,
Speaker 3: and I said, I'm just not sure. I don't think
Speaker 3: I have the time, and they wrote me again and
Speaker 3: I just wrote back and I said I can't do
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I wish you well, and I meant to.
Speaker 3: I said, it's a really complishment to write a book.
Speaker 3: I just don't have the time to read your book,
Speaker 3: and that you know that's true.
Speaker 2: So I'm impressed that you're reading two books a week.
Speaker 2: I think I heard a statistic that the average person,
Speaker 2: or maybe the average American, reads one book a year.
Speaker 3: Which come on that can't be true. That can't be true.
Speaker 2: I know right like that that nearly gave me a
Speaker 2: heart attack. That statistic, and he's very depressing as someone
Speaker 2: that does write books, like i'd left to know maybe
Speaker 2: like in the last six months. Given you know, that's
Speaker 2: a sample of about fifty books, what's one of the
Speaker 2: books that has had the biggest impact on you?
Speaker 3: I am in I will tell you I'm reading a
Speaker 3: book right now that is so fucking good and it's
Speaker 3: not what I normally read, and it is just incredible.
Speaker 3: And I'm just going to get the exact title books.
Speaker 3: I don't want to get it wrong. Here, Burning Boy,
Speaker 3: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster,
Speaker 3: And this book is a biography of Stephen Crane, great
Speaker 3: American writer from the late eighteen hundreds. Paul Ouster, though
Speaker 3: is I think the writer I read most closely in
Speaker 3: my twenties, and he is an incredible fiction writer. He
Speaker 3: has written some of my favorite books. I haven't read
Speaker 3: him as closely over the last ten or fifteen years
Speaker 3: for whatever reason. Things go in seasons. But I saw
Speaker 3: this book in the books and it's, you know, like
Speaker 3: six hundred page biography of a writer that I've read
Speaker 3: Red Badge of Courage like everybody else, but I haven't
Speaker 3: read anything else by Crane. I don't think though, I'm
Speaker 3: going to read all of it. I hadn't read anything
Speaker 3: else by Crane except Red Badge of Courage. So I
Speaker 3: left it in the bookstore one day and then I
Speaker 3: went I love bookstores, my favorite place to go. I
Speaker 3: went back two weeks later. I started staring it again,
Speaker 3: and I was like, you know what, something's calling me.
Speaker 3: This book's calling me. And I started reading it, and
Speaker 3: I just have to tell you, it is the most
Speaker 3: magnificently written book about America and this guy and capitalism
Speaker 3: and war, and it's amazing halfway through, and it's slow going,
Speaker 3: like I read. I do read two books at the
Speaker 3: same time, like off and I a fiction and nonfiction
Speaker 3: book going, and I say two books a week. It
Speaker 3: might be two books in ten days and then three
Speaker 3: books over the next whatever. But I do have two books,
Speaker 3: usually two books going at the same time. And I'm
Speaker 3: reading this Paul Oster book slowly, but I'm just blown
Speaker 3: away by how much I how much I love it.
Speaker 3: So that's a full that's just a full recommend from me.
Speaker 3: To anybody listening to.
Speaker 2: This, I'm so good to check that out. I'm exactly
Speaker 2: the same with my reading habits. I've always got a
Speaker 2: fiction at a nonfiction going at the same time.
Speaker 3: Oh I love that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's so good.
Speaker 2: I'm reading the Power of Regret, Dan Pink's new book
Speaker 2: at the moment, you know, interviewing him in a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks, and I got to say, I'm just loving it.
Speaker 2: It's I who would have thought reading a book about
Speaker 2: regret would be just captivating and it is. So that
Speaker 2: is my recommendation for the listeners wanting another book to read.
Speaker 3: I'll give you one more though, and you should have this.
Speaker 3: This would be a great guest for you. And do
Speaker 3: you know if I say little Steven Stephen van Zant,
Speaker 3: do you know who that is?
Speaker 1: No? I don't.
Speaker 3: Little Steve van Zandt is best known as being like
Speaker 3: Bruce Springsteen's creative partner guitar player since the beginning, produced
Speaker 3: some of the albums with Bruce, but he's also was
Speaker 3: one of the leads on the Sopranos. He was Silvio
Speaker 3: on the Sopranos, and he said this incredible life of
Speaker 3: and so he was Tony. Basically he served the same
Speaker 3: role for Tony soprano that he served in real life
Speaker 3: for Bruce Springsteen, and he was Silvio on The Sopranos.
Speaker 3: And he wrote this book called Unrequited Infatuations. That's all
Speaker 3: about the work. It's completely about process. It is a
Speaker 3: full on premer about the process of being a rock star, writer, producer.
Speaker 3: He would be a magnificent guest for you. He's a
Speaker 3: great talker and an incredibly well read person. And the
Speaker 3: book's great Unrequired Infatuations. It reads like a novel, but
Speaker 3: it's a memoir.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay that I'm going to check out. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to check that book out now, Brian.
Speaker 2: For people that want to connect with you in some way,
Speaker 2: consume more of what you're doing.
Speaker 1: What is the best way for people to do that?
Speaker 3: The two I mean, I'm on Twitter and I'm active
Speaker 3: on Twitter at Brian Koppleman. I'm also on Instagram. I'm
Speaker 3: slightly less active there, and on TikTok I'm slightly less
Speaker 3: active even than I am on Instagram, but always oh,
Speaker 3: I think on TikTok, maybe I'm Brian w compliment, but
Speaker 3: I'm verified there, so you'll know it's really me, and
Speaker 3: you can find me on Twitter or Instagram too. There
Speaker 3: are some impersonation accounts, but if the blue check is there,
Speaker 3: then it's me.
Speaker 1: Awesome.
Speaker 2: I'll link to the correct accounts in the show notes. Brian,
Speaker 2: It's just been such a treat, like this hour has
Speaker 2: flown by, and I'm so grateful that you did say yes.
Speaker 1: So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just been
Speaker 1: such a pleasure.
Speaker 3: My pleasure, great questions, great talking to you. Can't wait
Speaker 3: to hear it.
Speaker 2: I just loved this chat with Brian, and I think
Speaker 2: the thing that's still sticks with me weeks after doing
Speaker 2: the interview is the idea of how he writes to
Speaker 2: music and how that creates the emotion and the vibe
Speaker 2: that he wants to create and communicate in the scene
Speaker 2: that he's working on.
Speaker 1: I just love that image. Now, if you're not.
Speaker 2: A subscriber or follower of how I work, now might
Speaker 2: be the day to do so, because next week I
Speaker 2: have got Eric Barker on the show.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I have subscribed to Eric's newsletter along with three hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty thousand other people for many years, because he
Speaker 2: writes a newsletter that is evidence based about how to
Speaker 2: live a more bowesome life, and I'll be interviewing him
Speaker 2: about some of the very quirky strategies that he uses
Speaker 2: in how he approaches his own working rituals. How I
Speaker 2: Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead
Speaker 2: Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Riordan,
Speaker 2: and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio
Speaker 2: mix for every show and makes everything sound so much.
Speaker 1: Better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.