Sully, Elf, Bonhoeffer, and what it takes to master your craft
Jordan Raynor sits down with Todd Komarnicki, Screenwriter, to talk about how he was able to get a rare laugh out of Clint Eastwood when they were making Sully, why we need to question the language we use about being “hidden in Christ,” and how to get better at receiving feedback on your work.
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[00:00:05]JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today's guest is Todd Komarnicki. He is a prolific screenwriter, best known for writing and producing the mammoth hits, Sully and Elf. We sat down and we talked about how he was able to get a rare laugh out of Clint Eastwood, when they were making Sully, together. We talked about why we should be questioning the language we use about losing our identities in Christ. We talked about how we can all get better at receiving feedback on our work in order to pursue mastery of our crafts. Guys, I think you're going to enjoy this fun episode with my new friend Todd Komarnicki.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:19]JR: Todd, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:21]TK: Thank you, Jordan.
[00:01:23]JR: Recommended by former guest, Scott Harrison. I know, you know Scott's story quite well. What do you love most about the Scott Harrison, Thirst story?
[00:01:35]TK: For me, it was a reminder of all the places that I had been personally rescued from. I listened to the book for the first time on audio, and I listened to Scott tell his own story. I just found myself sobbing throughout the experience, because even though I'm ten years older than Scott, we walked the same streets. I wasn't a club promoter, but I certainly was living a life not of my highest calling for my early years in New York and made a lot of bad decisions. Decisions that hurt me, that hurt others, that were certainly going to be heartbreaking to my loving God.
I was rescued and protected somehow. That is the story anyway of the gospel, which is that God reaches in and rescues us from the life, whether we're the prodigal son or we only cheated cribbage. There's something fundamentally broken that needs to be healed and that comes through the rescuing love of Jesus Christ. So the Thirst story felt everybody's story in the rescuing part, and then the specificity of New York really hit home.
[00:02:43]JR: Well, there's a few people listening who are like, “What are these guys talking about?” So go back. Listen to my episode with Scott Harrison, the founder and CEO of Charity: Water. Thirst is this extraordinary autobiography of Scott's life, but really the life of the organization as well. I think I mentioned this on that episode. It's the only book I've ever cried reading. It was late at night. I'll never forget it. I was raising Venture Capital on the West Coast in San Francisco. I was sitting in San Francisco International Airport. It must have been 11:30 Pacific Time. I'm an East Coast guy, so I'm exhausted. I'm just sitting there reading this book with this terrible cheeseburger sitting next to me from the airport and just weeping, bawling my eyes out over this incredible story.
By the way, I read in your bio or something you describing your conversion story as being, quote, “Spectacularly saved by Jesus Christ.” What's the story there? I think you've alluded to it here, but what was going on there, Tom?
[00:03:45]TK: Well, that original rescue happened when I was in college. It’s a rather deep dive, a little intense maybe for the listeners, but what it involves is deciding and planning, and plotting the end of my life. So where God found me on the very edge of myself, on the very edge of something else that one could leap from, God literally grabbed me by the belt and kept me here. Not just once. I'm aware every day when I look at my wife and kids, when I breathe, when I taste even the worst cup of coffee that it is a miracle to be here. I know who is the one that saved me.
[00:04:44]JR: This first experience is going back early in your life, you said high school and college?
[00:04:49]TK: That was college.
[00:04:50]JR: Yeah.
[00:04:50]TK: I grew up in a Christian home, but in a similar way, the Scott story plays out. As soon as I left the home front, the faith quickly dissipated. I don't know if that's everybody's story. I have two older sisters. It was the story for one of my sisters, but not for the other one. So there are certainly people that grow up in a Christian home. I hope that's the case for my two kids, who are growing up knowing about the love of Jesus that can stay connected. But many of us, because we need to make our faith our own anyway, many of us have a very hard road before we understand what it is to fall to your knees and surrender, and really recognize that you need the Lord.
For me, church or Bible study or any of that stuff when I was a kid was just another competitive event. It was how fast could you go in Bible drill? That's a huge wake-up call one day in my senior year of high school, and this pre-staged me dumping my faith a year later, but we were coming back to church and I had the bulletin from church in my hand and it said "11:00 worship service." I asked my parents, I can't believe I was this naive, but I said, “Why is it called a worship service?” So here had been going to church my whole life and I didn't understand that we were supposed to be there to worship God, that we were supposed to, I thought we were there to kill time before the NFL.
[00:06:14]JR: Yeah.
[00:06:15]TK: Well, my faith was pretty thin before I went to college. Then everything fell apart and the rescue took place. It actually took me a long time to accept that God had saved my life. I was pretty grumpy about it for about a year. But the tables –
[00:06:34]JR: Why is that?
[00:06:37]TK: I don't know. I think the darkness really wants to hang on to us when it has us. I'd been in the dark for so long, and you get used to habits of thinking and also habits of viewing yourself. It's really hard to come face-to-face with the fact that Jesus died for you as an individual. It's an abstraction until you really receive it fully. It takes a while, took me a while.
[00:07:07]JR: Well, there's also a lot of weight that's carried with that, right? Once that becomes personal, I lose myself to find myself. I lose my life. I lose my sense of self, and I am hidden in Christ, and everything becomes about him. My whole life has to revolve around that person now. That's a gigantic leap for any person, especially a young person to make.
[00:07:32]TK: Yeah. I think the language of it is wrong. I think what is missing there is the specificity of who we're supposed to be, the one Jordan, the one Todd of all time that we’re handmade by God, that we're knit together in our mother's womb. All the love affair between God and the individual gets muted in this – I have to disappear into be hidden. Yes, hidden but transformed from one degree of glory to another and made fully human, spiritually alive. Our puppy, Maggie, agrees with a righteous bark as she tries to get the volleyball.
[00:08:11]JR: That's, amen.
[00:08:14]TK: Amen, sister Maggie.
[00:08:15]JR: Yeah.
[00:08:16]TK: We need to talk about how we talk about it.
[00:08:18]JR: Yeah.
[00:08:18]TK: To the young people, because when you're just finding your identity in the beginning and a number of people are telling you that you don't really have an identity, you just got to wrap up and join the team. That's not what's happening. It's the fullness of your identity. It’s who you are really meant to be and not walk around spiritually dead while physically and emotionally alive.
[00:08:44]JR: Yeah. No, it's good.
[00:08:46]TK: You got a lot of language, and a lot of the language of the churches needs a redo.
[00:08:50]JR: No doubt. It's one of the problems I have any time I hear pastors talking about not making your work, your identity. I understand what they're saying. I think what they're saying is don't make success your ultimate source of self-worth. I can celebrate that, right? But to say that like, Todd, being a screenwriter isn't a part of who you are, it’s crazy. Of course, it’s a part of who you are, it’s who God designed you to be. God designed me to be a writer, right? That is a core part of my identity. I think we even see this with God himself in Genesis, right? Before he tells us that he is loving or holy. He says that he's a worker, a creator, right? That is a part of his identity and our identity as his image bearers, right? We’re going to talk about how we talk about these things, I like the way he put that.
[00:09:39]TK: I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, I'm 56, so I think I've finally started enjoying writing about seven years ago. The bulk of my creative life, I didn't like doing it. In fact this will underline your previous point. My father's wisdom exactly articulated what you just mentioned, so in 2006 or 2007, I'd had it with the movie business. It's a heartbreaking business, even in the best of times. The fact that I was blessed enough to sell material, but nothing was getting made had caused me to reach the end of my tether.
My patience was gone for screenwriting and writing in general. I'd written three books by that time that had been published, but they hadn't sold well. I just like, “Okay, listen, I'm running into a brick wall here. Obviously there's something else. I don't enjoy what I'm doing, and it's not bearing the fruit that I want, so therefore it should be catapulted out of my life.” I said to my dad, we meeting up in London, and I said, I poured out my heart to him and he'd been a supporter of my dream. He and my mom had supported my journey from the beginning of wanting to be a writer when there was no proof that I could do it at all. I thought this was a safe place to lay down my banner.
I said to my dad, “Listen, I feel like it's time to quit and I'm done, and I'd like to talk to you about some of the things that I might do with my life. Here I am in my thirties, my late thirties.” My father went away for a couple of days, and he came back and he sat down with me and he said, “I have an answer. I know how you're going to get through this patch, but you're not going to my answer. The answer is that you are going to write your way through it.” I said –
[00:11:24]JR: You're going to write your way out, in the words of Hamilton.
[00:11:27]TK: Yeah. I said, “But that's a thing I'm not doing.” I don't know if you noticed that between the scones and the clotted cream that I was saying, “No more writing. Okay, you're right. That's wrong. I'm not writing.” He laughed. He said, “Tod, I've known you since the moment you poked your head into this world. I'll tell you, one thing I do know about you is you are a writer. It is how you see the world. It is how you live your day. It's how you collect your thoughts. Yeah, you're frustrated. You've earned your frustration, but you're going to write your way out of this.” I said, “Dad, I love you. You're my best friend. You're totally wrong.” Three weeks later, I called him and said, “Okay, I'm going to write.”
[00:12:12]JR: What would happen three weeks later?
[00:12:14]TK: I realized he was right. I had to write my way out of it. That was the beginning of actually learning how to like writing, because writing is hard.
[00:12:21]JR: Yeah. It's super hard. What was the first big break for you?
[00:12:28]TK: I had the great good fortune of working right away out of college, so there were several little mini-breaks that encourage me to continue in the career. First thing that happened was I was writing copy for Disney movies, movies like Cocktail and The Fox and the Hound, there would be a double feature for you. Let's see if we can arrange that at the drive-in, post-COVID. I was writing this and making good money, because I could do a turn of phrase and make you want to go see an animated fox chasing an animated dog.
[00:13:01]JR: Yeah.
[00:13:03]TK: It was a certain magic touch.
[00:13:05]JR: What a disappointing movie. Yeah.
[00:13:07]TK: Yeah, sorry about that. That’s the thing, the trick about trailers is to convince people that there's something there when there's nothing there. So, I got that kind advertising right. My favorite story from that point of my career is that I won a Key Art award, which is the Oscars of advertising, writing for movies, for the trailer for Addams Family. In fact, I shared that award with Mark Paikus, who is a friend, and he was a legend in the copywriting business. If you were ever to look at the award winning, Addams Family trailer, you would realize that there is no copy in the trailer. It was scenes from the movie, followed by a title and it says, “Addams Family rated PG.”
[00:13:51]JR: Won an award.
[00:13:54]TK: Mark and I won the award for best copy for that and in my speech, I said, “I would to thank Mark, because without him, my a bad copy would never been crossed out and his bad copy, I never would have erased, so together we were able to come up with this wordless copy and thank you for understanding the power of silence.”
[00:14:14]JR: This is amazing.
[00:14:17]TK: That perfectly synergizes what is wrong with Hollywood, anyway. But I have that award and I love it. I'm never going to let it go.
[00:14:24]JR: All right. What's the best, most retold story from Sully or Elf?
[00:14:30]TK: Retold?
[00:14:32]JR: What's the story you tell all the time at parties? Yeah –
[00:14:35]TK: What's the story that no one ever told where –
[00:14:37]JR: That’s a good question –
[00:14:39]TK: I lost on the river in Texas Hold ‘Em to Clint Eastwood at three in the morning. He won 3 million dollars, off me, but in charity, he gave me 2.8 million back. That didn't happen. I wish it had happened. That would have been great. “I'm all in, Clint.” Now my favorite story, and this is a story that I tell a lot, my favorite story is that I got to hear something that I don't think anybody else except for his family has ever heard, which is I got to hear Clint Eastwood laugh. If you think about it and all the movies that you've seen, even in his comedies, he doesn't laugh. He's a very serious cat. In real life, he's incredibly genial, but his characters never laugh.
I had not yet met him. I was on the phone with him when I heard him laugh, and it happened from the following circumstance. He asked me what I thought about casting for the movie, who would make it good Sully. We bandied about a few names, and then he said, “What about that Tom Hanks?”
[00:15:40]JR: You know, that Tom guy.
[00:15:42]TK: I said, “From Bosom Buddies?” That was the long, lustrous guffaw that Mr. Eastwood give to me with that I'll always have in my ear chamber. That got him. I was so nervous when I was on that call with him, I couldn't believe I pulled the joke out of my hat. That was complete –
[00:16:03]TK: Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:03]TK: Everybody said to me, “Listen, he doesn't the fanboy approach. We're all pros. You're a grown up. He loves your script. He's making your script. Just don't go on a thing where you’re telling him how awesome he is.” I made it through 90% of the call and then Unforgiven, came up. I folded it like a pup tent. I did what must have been an hour and a half on Unforgiven, and every shot and how it changed westerns forever and redeemed every bullet he'd ever fired on screen. Then I saw it with my dad, and I just, I went on and on and on.
Thank God, he ended it graciously. He said the following – just another great Hollywood story. He said, “That just goes to prove that I was right.” I said, “Well, what we right about?” He said, “Well, I keep a letter framed in my office is the only letter I've ever framed. It's from my head of development that was working at Malpaso at the time that Unforgiven, came in as a script. The letter reads essentially, ‘Dear Clint, not only is this unreadable bunch of garbage not worthy of your time and your talents, but no one should ever make this movie it's irredeemable. I'm stained by having read it. It's awful and – ’
[00:17:26]JR: It’s unforgivable.
[00:17:27]TK: Yeah, it is. It was unforgivable. Of course, this movie goes on to win every award and win Best Picture and nominated for Best Screenplay, and it's a legendary screenplay. Clint said, “I keep that keep that framed to my office to remind myself never to listen to anybody.”
[00:17:48]JR: Nobody in the words of William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.”
[00:17:51]TK: Just go with your gut. His gut has been pretty golden. It was nice to be on the proper side of his gut.
[00:17:58]JR: That's amazing. C.S. Lewis once said, “We don't need more Christian books. We need more Christians writing great books.” It seems you've applied that advice to your own work as a screenwriter, right? Working, writing in the mainstream. Why that path?
[00:18:15]TK: Like I said, I never wanted to do it, so you'd have to ask God. I feel like it's been – and I use a dog metaphor looking at my little puppy here, it's been very akin the way a mother dog will lift a puppy by the scruff of their neck or anywhere in nature where you see the grown up lift the child from here to there and say, “No, you're not doing that. You’re doing this.” That's what my entire career felt like. I was not aiming to be a screenwriter. I think if my books had sold, I probably would have been happy to buckle into a novelist career, but that didn't happen.
Again and again, the way the bills got paid was this movie storytelling. The best part about writing for the screen is that it's so technically demanding that it never loses interest for me. Every movie is a solve. Every movie is an intense puzzle. How you do a brand new thing within this old structure with this rising action and the first act, middle of the movie, end of second act, hero in trouble. The movie-goer experience is linked ineluctable to the way screenplays are structured that you won't feel that in a movie, but you will feel the satisfaction that when something it's called back in the last 10-minutes of the movie that was laid down by the screenwriter in the first 10-minutes of the movie, if it's a good movie, you'll understand, “Oh, that's why he always carried his tennis racket.” Or, “That’s what that phone message meant.”
That kind of, "set them up and knock them down," and the carrying an audience on the roller coaster of a movie ride is the hardest part of writing a screenplay. I love that part of it. I love the science of it. I love that it feels inscrutable for ages and then suddenly locks in. I remember when I sent in the draft that they shot of Sully, my producer, Allyn Stewart, she called me and she said, “You must have gone to the chiropractor, because you just cracked these spines back.” That's it. The script got aligned in that last draft and it worked.
[00:20:38]JR: I love it. You've reached – I got to imagine you've reached this place in your career where you've got a lot of choice of the projects you're going to work on, what you're going to write. I'm curious if your faith informs that process, which projects you decide to take on?
[00:20:56]TK: What is my faith not informed?
[00:20:58]JR: Yeah, that's the right answer.
[00:21:01]TK: It's just –
[00:21:01]JR: What does that look like practically?
[00:21:05]TK: I don't know. I don't know what it looks like the other way. It just looks like life. I mean, it's just, I wake up, I start in prayer. The only place I want to be. I just came from meeting a friend who I've been in touch with a little bit, but I haven't seen her, I don't know, I probably haven't seen her in nine years, but there was no question that, that was an appointment set by God. She had a very specific thing that she didn't know she needed to talk about and she did. We turned it over to the Lord and we pointed it in in His direction, so that she didn't have to carry it anymore. She was carrying something that she didn't need to be carrying. That's happening all day, every day.
She got these appointments around town, but my last name is Komarnicki which is Ukrainian. My grandfather, Joseph Komarnicki was from the village of Komarnicki in Southwest Ukraine. These are fraught times, heartbreaking times for us. I mention him because he was a street corner preacher in Philadelphia. It was a short order cook at Boyd's Diner and the on his off time, he was either feeding the homeless or preaching on the street corner. My dad was mortified by this. He was really embarrassed to have his dad out there. He would go to listen to my dad, not to listen, but to make sure that the people that inevitably heckled Joe were taken out of the crowd.
My dad was a very strong guy who's a football player, and he would just quietly strong-arm someone away from the crowd and just say, “Move on. You don't you don't need to heckle that gentleman.” He was protecting his dad in that way. But that thing that embarrassed my dad years later, my dad I called him the ‘diner booth preacher’,because that's where he could always be found with the Bible open and sharing the gospel with every waitress and every wandering soul. Then he had a son in me who realizes that's pretty much the only thing I want to do. My favorite thing in the world is to talk about Jesus. He lets me talk about Him all the time, every day, everywhere. It's really nice. Very humbling.
[00:23:18]JR: It is amazing. Knowing that that's your passion in life, I think it makes it even more interesting that you're writing the mainstream and not writing, “Christian films” as if films have a soul which obviously they don't. That's interesting to me. Do you find that these more mainstream films have ways of communicating spiritual truth, even though they're not using the name of Jesus? I mean, I think about Unforgiven, I guess a pretty good example.
[00:23:50]TK: There's one story it's why people to see Superman in the Jesus Christ pose in a superhero movie.
[00:23:58]JR: Yeah.
[00:23:58]TK: There's one story. Everybody's just telling it in a different way. Some people are telling it in a terrible way, but you can get an understanding of light in a terrified movie if it's done right, because it shows you what the dark looks like. You're like, “Well, I don't want that. I want something. I'm going to run in the other direction from that.” When you say mainstream it's just, I want to tell the stories that move me. I'm about to direct a movie that I wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he's a Christian. I say again and again, this movie is not a faith-based movie.
If Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a NASCAR driver, nobody would say that it's a NASCAR-based movie. They would say it's a movie about a guy who drives NASCAR. This is a movie about a guy who did a lot of things. His motivation was his faith in Christ, but it could have been in many things. But the power and beauty of it is it happened to be in the living God and impacted millions and millions and millions of people. Still does, through his writings and through his courage, through the singular way that he lived out his faith. It challenges us to live out our faith in that same way. That grace was always first and foremost. That he brought a set of eyes to a hellish problem and did something about it.
[00:25:38]JR: Yeah.
[00:25:39]TK: I think right now we're so frozen in time, frozen by the 24-hour cycle of bad news that we don't know how to act heroically anymore. We just feel defeated.
[00:25:48]JR: How do we escape that trap?
[00:25:50]TK: Well, the Ukrainian people actually showed us how you do it. You stop and you fight. You don't roll over and you have to fight back, like Bruce Cockburn's great lyric, “You got to kick it to the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”
[00:26:06]JR: Yeah.
[00:26:06]TK: The darkness is often a bully, often. Look at how exposed Putin is now for being undermanned, and undersupplied, and underprepared. Everyone was so in awe of his power to bring the world to its knees. A month in, he's retreating. I think that's the case with a lot of strong men. I always pray when I think about people like that. I pray that God will Nebuchadnezzar them, that he will send them to a season of eating grass where they see that they are not God, and they get a second chance, because no one's beyond redemption.
[00:26:47]JR: Yeah. Amen. Reminds me of that Lewis quote. He says, “Christianity is a fighting religion.” The things God has made the world that space and time, heat and cold and all the cards and tastes and all the animals of vegetables are things that God made up out of his head as a man makes up a story, but it also there are a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made. That God insists and insists very loudly on our putting them right again, right? Rolling up our sleeves and fighting back against evil, against death, against injustice, right? How do you think film can do this? Can film do this?
[00:27:27]TK: I think, if anytime you tell the truth, it can do it. My favorite thing about Sully is that, it was a reminder and Sully's own humility, it was a reminder that without the rescue workers and the people on those ferries and everybody at the hospitals and everybody working in sync and the passengers keeping a cool head, it wouldn't have been 155, like everybody collaborated to be both hero and saved. We all need each other. That message came through and in that movie. I think it landed the truth part of the plane.
[00:28:04]JR: Yeah.
[00:28:05]TK: Then with Elf, that's not a Christian movie, but guess what happens in Elf, light wins. Everyone's afraid of Buddy and how New York is going to change him and turn him into someone he's not, but you can't do that, because he's just pure light. He winds up changing everybody else, because light wins and that's the fact. In the end of all this nonsense, light wins.
[00:28:29]JR: I read, I don't know if this is true. I read the when Denzel read the script for Training Day. He was like, “I don't want to do it.” Then he came back to it and he wrote some pastor scripture in the margin of the script. I don't know what it was, but basically he decided to do the movie, because he wanted to show that darkness doesn't win. That eventually you'll be found out and be held accountable for your actions. I was like, “I love that.” It's a story about, it's a very dark film, but it's really a story about how darkness doesn't win. I think film can communicate those truths in a really subtle, but really powerful way.
[00:29:08]TK: Very wise. David Ayer is a phenomenal writer and he and wrote another favorite movie mine, Fury. Training Day is a great, great script for the reason that Denzel said, but also just how it's knit together. The screenwriter side of that script is really strong.
[00:29:26]JR: What are your daily spiritual habits? What's that look like for you? You mentioned starting the day with word in prayer.
[00:29:32]TK: Yeah. Everybody struggles with wanting to read the scripture more than they do, everybody. No matter how much you read. Rick Warren in one of his little daily devotionals that my wife sent to me, I don't know, maybe a year ago. Had this very simple thing, which was "His word first, His word last." That just made it really easy. I've got the Bible in One Year, which is Alpha, puts out this, the Bible in One Year, Nicky Gumbel. For the scripture there is, New Testament, Gospel and Old Testament. So start the day in scripture and then get into bed at night and end the day with scripture. That's what I've been doing for the last bit of time, and it's been very fruitful.
I like everyone, had long droughts and grieved. At one point, I was really asking in Bible study. Please pray that I would have an insatiable desire to read scripture. Then about six months later, I got hired to write a movie about King David at Warner Brothers. About two weeks into it, I'm sitting and I'm writing and I've got the Bible open and I'm reading Psalm after Psalm and all of these parts of the Old Testament and I just burst out laughing. I was like, “Well, there you go. There's your answered prayer. You were struggling to read it for 10-minutes. Now you're reading it 8-hours a day.”
[00:30:59]JR: That’s good. Todd, what great screenwriters do that good screenwriters don't do? What's the delta between good and great in your craft?
[00:31:11]TK: Well, I would say this, I haven't been lucky enough to work with on the producing side. I've been lucky enough to work with the geniuses like Zaillian and Tony Gilroy. There's a handful of people that are just extraordinary that I delight in watching their movies and reading their scripts. But I work a lot with as we develop stuff like a Guy Walks into a Bar. My company, I work a lot with writers, pro-writers that are terrific writers, but the thing that's missing is twofold. One is almost nobody can rewrite forward. Well, to take notes and make the script better. They're given notes to make the script better and they can only get it incrementally far.
That's one thing, because there's a listening block. All writers think they're done, before they're done. Fatigue and ego and lots of things keep people from pushing through and doing really hard stuff. The other thing I found is, I've met almost nobody who can do the last five yards. That's the really doing the fine brushwork that makes the script set apart. I haven't met anybody that can do that work. What I say to young writers is, there are about 10,000 people in the Writer's Guild and even at peak TV now, they're probably 2000 people writing in the world for all this content.
That's an open door, because there's nobody that can do it well. It's such a rare skill. So if you can hone it and you can work on your craft, you have a spot at the table, we're waiting, we please, please, good writers, please show up. The main thing I would request from all writers that are coming into the business or working in the business is that you just stop thinking that you're ever done. My scripts have 35 drafts never done, never done. I've got two guys that work for me that beat me up all the time. The house rule is the script doesn't go out until every scene is as good as the best scene.
[00:33:28]JR: Yeah.
[00:33:28]TK: Writers just don't have that. The writers I have worked with don't have that level of discipline and never quit. They don't, one or two.
[00:33:42]JR: Yeah. Even once the script ships. I've heard Aaron Sorkin, one of my favorite screenwriters, talk about this. As soon as he turns in the script, he immediately wants to take it back and rewrite it, because there's always this belief that better is possible. That it could be better than it was –
[00:34:02]TK: That's the opposite viewpoint. He's a perfectionist, but what I've run into is the opposite. “Ah, that’s good enough. How much better can it get?” It's got five great scenes, like people just don't want to put in the work.
[00:34:15]JR: Right. Right. That’s exactly right.
[00:34:16]TK: It's hard, man. –
[00:34:18]JR: Yeah. But this is a theme we hear going back to the listening block. This is a theme we hear from people across a bunch of different vocations that not just hearing feedback, but listen into it and letting that feedback change your work to make it better. That is one of the keys to mastering any craft. If there's a listener right now, sitting there back, “Okay, how do I do this better? How do I receive and implement feedback better?” What tips do you have for them, Todd?
[00:34:51]TK: Don't take it personally. Just think of it as, what's best for the patient? What's best for the script? Also, this took me a long time to learn, but there's no such thing as a bad note. What I mean by that is, most notes you get are not great, but if you're lucky and have a strong producer. Then you can get great notes, but not every note is a great note. But every note will point to something. If you get a really terrible note that is proof that the person didn't read the script or they're just completely bonkers. You still need to look at where that area was noted and you need to make sure that you can sure it up and that you can defend why it is what it is, because if you're just dismissing the note but not looking at the sore tooth, then you're denying somebody that's going to come back and get you later.
It's humility and embracing work. It's hard. Nobody wants to hear, it's not good enough, nobody. It hurts to hear that, but once you absorb that personal blow, then you put that aside and you're like, “How do I make this special? How do I take it to the next level? How do I get better at my craft?” Because every time you do go back, you have a chance to make it better and you become better, just by the fact that you're willing to do the work. More splinters. I always talk about building chairs. We need more splinters in our fingers. We need more cuts and gashes. We need more proof that we're putting in the work, instead of just hoping and wishing and that's the other thing.
I talk about this a lot, but the movie business through the press over the last 30 or 40 years has made screenwriting sound like a scratch your ticket. That someone can come out of nowhere with one screenplay and change your life and make $1,000,000. Although that does happen, if you are not prepared for a career, if you haven't done other work and that's your one script, you're going to be rewritten and then you're going to have to start from scratch anyway. So just building up inventory, getting good, doing the practice of writing, writing all the time, and not just having ideas, but writing, writing, writing –
[37:03] JR: It’s just good all purposeful practice.
[37:04] TK: It’s all in the work, it's –
[00:37:05]JR: It's all in the work and putting in the reps. It's the same with any vocation. That's really good. Todd, three questions, I love wrapping up every conversation with number one. Which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting most frequently to others?
[00:37:20]TK: Well, one screenwriting book which is, Making A Good Script Great, by Linda Seger. That's fantastic. That's the one that's not up in the lofty trees of metaphor and nonsense. That's the one I really like. I was thinking about a novel, remember? We were talking about crying earlier in this thing. I read a book a number of years ago now, and I recommend it all the time. I give it away a lot. An amazing novel called Stone Arabia. I was finishing it on an airplane and it's the section where everything came together, hit me with such a frying pan. It reshaped my face. I sobbed there for a good 10-minutes in my chair in the airplane.
About half an hour later, the guy next to me said, “Hey, can I ask you what book you were reading?” I said, “Yes. Stone Arabia.” He takes out a pen and he writes it down and he underlines it, and he goes, “I just want to make sure that I never, ever read that book.”
[00:38:25]JR: That's amazing.
[00:38:28]TK: I don't want that happening to me. What did that book do to you? It’s like a magic trick. Is it well the great writing is like a magic trick, it just literally, boom, it's there, the emotion. The Stone Arabia is amazing. The classics, the probably the book that I reference the most is Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke, because there's so much good stuff in there about marriage. When you're married and you have kids and everybody you know is married, you talk about marriage a lot. That's got my favorite thing about marriage, I think, which is when two people come together in love, their highest duty is to be the guardian over their partner's solitude. The guardian over their solitude.
Everyone comes into marriages and they think that they're supposed to disappear into the marriage or they're supposed to do everything with their partner or find everything in their partner and that's not healthy. If you don't have solitude time to do your own thing or do your time with God or whatever you're seeking, you lose yourself. Then, therefore you bring less of yourself into the marriage. When your spouse is the protector of your solitude, it makes you so much stronger.
[00:39:38]JR: That is a word. I think about solitude a lot. I wrote about it in a recent book called Redeeming Your Time. We're living in what Louis called “The Kingdom of Noise.” Solitude is one of the rarest things in the world. Yeah, I think a lot about how I can cultivate it, but I can't cultivate it without my bride. Likewise, I do think about how to guard her time of solitude, her time whether it's an hour in the morning before the kids get up, make it sure she's got her time by herself, maybe I've never thought about that's part of my job. I'm just, yeah, that's a good word. It's a good word. All right, Todd. Who do you want to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith shapes their work?
[00:40:25]TK: Jordan Raynor.
[00:40:26]JR: Great. Done. It’s a good answer.
[00:40:28]TK: I’ll interview with you.
[00:40:30]JR: Yeah. Then let's do that. Let's do a mike flip. Todd interviews Jordan. All right –
[00:40:35]TK: We’ll make it a Toddcast.
[00:40:37]JR: Toddcast, here you go.
[00:40:38]TK: I want to leave this stuff, because this work and faith and it's been the thing, the topic for the last number of years. People have asked me, I've spoken to different groups about it. My approach is to as you just said, “Flip the mike around” – is to completely reinvigorate the conversation by saying how in the world do I learn to integrate my work in my faith?
[00:41:08]JR: Yeah.
[00:41:09]TK: That's it. Can you talk about identity and talk about being rescued and saved. If Jesus and that's your journey, then all He wants from you is to guide you how to integrate your work, your sleep, play, everything through Him so that He can, as you said, redeeming your time, He can redeem the fullness of your life. There is this thing called work that He calls us to, X amount of hours are demanded of us. We have to pay the bills. We have to do all these things. There's a reason for that. The world has been built by hands at work, and backs that work, and legs that work, and minds that work.
Clearly He finds joy in work, but just because it's the thing we do the most doesn't mean it's the most important thing, because you could just say the same thing, we sleep more than we work, or we'd to see more than we work. We sleep a lot. The people don't talk much about how do you integrate your faith into your sleep? No, you integrate your sleep, your play, your joy, your wonder, your study, your full human experience through the fact that once upon a time it's actually true that once upon a time, God so loved the world that He gave His only son.
That's the one thing that ever happened. It was happening before the beginning of time. Christ was with God. It's the hinge of history. His resurrection has shaped every single thing before, during and after. Let's try to figure out how to integrate everything else into that. Then we'll have real freedom.
[00:42:48]JR: I think if you ask Jesus to talk about his spiritual life, I think he would have looked at us we were crazy, like, “You mean, my life?” I don't understand all life is spiritual. All my work is spiritual, everything is spiritual. It's one life and that's fully integrated. Todd, I want to commend you for the truly exceptional work you do in the world. Thank you for telling stories, even some dark ones that point to redemption, that shine light. Thank you for serving as light in a dark world. Todd, where can our listeners learn more about you and your work.
[00:43:25]TK: It's funny, I was talking recently about maybe writing a book and the topic came up about, well, what is your platform? I was like, “Well, what do you need my platform? High-heeled shoes?”
[00:43:37]JR: I wrote Sully. That's my platform.
[00:43:39]TK: Was it now. What it meant was social media platforms. What is your social media platform? I have aggressively avoided having one.
[00:43:48]JR: God bless you.
[00:43:48]TK: I think tweeting is especially for a mind that likes wordplay and likes to be funny and fast. Tweeting is an invitation to hell. I mean, literally, it's just a way to constantly sabotage your place in the world by trying to be clever. I've avoided all that stuff. So when you say where can you learn more? I don't know. I mean, watch this space. The next thing it's happening is we're going to make this Bonhoeffer movie and we start shooting in the fall. It'll be out next year some time. It's called God Spy, so hopefully by the grace of God, I'll be able to deliver something that moves the human soul.
[00:44:29]JR: I love it. Todd, thanks for joining us.
[00:44:31]TK: Peace of Christ, brother.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:44:32]JR: I hope you guys enjoyed that episode with Todd. Hey, if you're enjoying the Call to Mastery, do me a favor. Go leave a review of the show wherever you review your podcasts. Thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. I'll see you next time.
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