Labor of Love with M. Night Shyamalan | Development Hell

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Speaker 33 I've had such an exceptionally curated career.

Speaker 33 Every movie I've ever written since 18 has been

Speaker 33 greenlit to be made into a movie. You've seen everything I've written, you know,

Speaker 33 except for

Speaker 33 this one that we're going to talk about.

Speaker 33 So it's an interesting.

Speaker 34 There's always a twist.

Speaker 35 Welcome back to Development Hell, our mini-series about the lost scripts of Hollywood.

Speaker 38 Today I'm talking with M.

Speaker 39 Night Shyamalan, one of the best-known filmmakers of the past generation.

Speaker 35 Suspense, thrillers, the supernatural, psychodrama.

Speaker 17 You know whose movies I'm sure.

Speaker 27 Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, Split, Glass.

Speaker 38 Something like 15 films in the last 30 years which collectively have grossed billions of dollars. M.
Night Shyamalan's stories have haunted a lot of people over the years.

Speaker 39 This episode is about the story that haunted M.

Speaker 38 Night Shyamalan.

Speaker 26 We've talked a lot so far in this series about movies that never got made because there was something wrong with the story or because someone on the outside had a problem with a script.

Speaker 35 This episode is about none of those things.

Speaker 38 There is nothing at all wrong with the story Shyamalan has never told.

Speaker 35 And maybe that's why he never told it.

Speaker 33 There was the first real script that I felt kind of

Speaker 33 lightning bolt inspiration that came to me. was 22 and I'd just been married, just got married, and I wrote a kind of a love story.
And it's called Labor of Love. And I was writing it and I wrote it,

Speaker 33 I almost can remember everywhere I wrote it because it was such a special experience of writing. By that time, that was my

Speaker 33 third feature that I had written. I had made

Speaker 33 made a movie already in India.

Speaker 42 Tell me a little bit about the story.

Speaker 36 What was Labor of Love about?

Speaker 33 You know, Labor of Love is essentially a story about an older couple

Speaker 33 and the wife saying, hey, it's an anniversary and he forgets and all of this stuff. And they've been together a long time.

Speaker 33 And she's just like, I, you know, essentially expresses, I do all these little things for you our whole life and you don't. And I'm not sure what you want from, you know, I'm not sure you love me.

Speaker 33 You know, I'm not 100% sure. And that's not a great feeling, you know and um he's baffled right as all guys are just baffled at this and and and uh what do you mean what do you mean

Speaker 36 what do you mean what do you want me i love you um who goes to work every morning who goes to what do you think i'm doing that for

Speaker 43 yeah yeah okay i get it i get it i get it

Speaker 33 um she i don't want to say too much of it because i'm i i i tend to think of these things as magic and

Speaker 33 just a taste yeah and and uh she she passes away unexpectedly

Speaker 33 and very tragically. And before she died, she said, he said, you know, what do you want me to do to prove my love to you?

Speaker 33 You want me to, you know, swim across an ocean or climb a mountain or walk across the United States? What do you want me to do?

Speaker 33 She's like, just walk to the store and get me something on your own because you were thinking, you know, something small like that. Anyway, she passes away.
He's an older man. He's in a...

Speaker 33 you know, late 60s, 70s kind of thing, out of shape. And he's so devastated.

Speaker 33 He makes a crazy decision to start walking across the United States for nothing else, but just to show his wife who's passed away in case she can see. And if this isn't, I wrote this in 1994, right?

Speaker 33 So

Speaker 33 no cell phones, no nothing, no internet. And he just begins this track.
And it's, it's a kind of a.

Speaker 33 like a vision quest a little bit. He starts to think about his life and his time with his wife and from when they were kids.
And he's physically in threat as he's doing this.

Speaker 33 And slowly the the the country starts to get a hear about this guy and they're trying to urge him to to get there and it's so crazy why are you doing this why are you doing this and then the country kind of gets on board with the feeling of doing something irrational to show your love for the person that you care about and i'm not going to tell you the ending but it's really poignant the idea of just doing something so the other person can hear you.

Speaker 41 So you're 22.

Speaker 45 You're very much in love.

Speaker 44 You've just married your wife, who you've known for how long at that point?

Speaker 33 I met when I was 18. So I know her for four years at that point.

Speaker 36 So the, and

Speaker 37 in this period of love-struck youth,

Speaker 40 when you are, you know, in love with your young wife, you write a story about an older couple.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 47 Where the question of the man's devotion to

Speaker 46 his wife is in doubt.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 36 In other words, I thought you were going to say, I wrote this at 22.

Speaker 41 I was just married to Roman Love.

Speaker 37 It's about this young couple who embark and a burrow.

Speaker 42 You jump forward 40 years and you start looking back.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 42 So in the period where you are of greatest infatuation, your impulse is to go to the end of the relationship and work backwards.

Speaker 33 Yeah. I mean, I think I've always been driven by familial

Speaker 33 nightmares.

Speaker 33 You know, the sanctity of the family being

Speaker 33 jeopardized. You know, later it changed into aliens and ghosts and you name it, but ultimately it's still about families and

Speaker 33 whether they can survive.

Speaker 37 What is it about you in a period of young love when you're already thinking about

Speaker 47 the kind of, not the dissolution of love, but the final stage of it.

Speaker 48 Why would you jump ahead?

Speaker 33 I guess you're thinking about your life and what you want it to be and where it could go wrong.

Speaker 33 And maybe I was thinking about what is it, what is it? What do I want this to be at the end of the journey, you know, 40 years from now, 50 years from now?

Speaker 33 I hope I've lived the life the right way.

Speaker 33 And of course, there's going to be a lot of mistakes along the way, but I don't have fears like the other people have fears in the sense of like, I knew I was going to marry her the second I met her, you know, like those things.

Speaker 33 I fear getting a call that something bad happened, you know, and that's very prevalent and still 30 years later.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 42 But you're asking yourself the question of

Speaker 50 what is the most tragic outcome of young love is that one is what you've described, is that one

Speaker 46 One party loves and the other party doesn't realize they're being loved.

Speaker 41 You put your finger on something that's like

Speaker 40 that's a deeply resonant anxiety.

Speaker 33 It is.

Speaker 33 Probably from the dynamic of me and my wife that, you know, she married a dreamer, someone who's completely content to stare out in an empty room and just do that all day long and think about an imaginary world with imaginary people and feel fulfilled.

Speaker 33 And she's like, well, I'm right here. You know, what about, what about the real life we're living, you know?

Speaker 33 And, and so the struggle has been, you know, I've heard all of those stories of, you know, from, you know, F.

Speaker 33 Scott Fitzgerald to you name it, you know, all our heroes and how they struggled with their personal life versus their artistry.

Speaker 33 Is it a

Speaker 33 one or the other equation?

Speaker 33 Sometimes it feels that way. And for a lot of people, it feels that way.
I've tried to see if they can be feed each other and it feeds the movies,

Speaker 33 the feeling of love for your wife or for your kids or, you know, and what does that mean? How can you imbue it? And you guys feel it when you see the movies and

Speaker 33 really the stories that I make.

Speaker 42 And the hardest thing to explain.

Speaker 46 to your spouse in that instance is that to them you seem inaccessible in that dreaming but from your perspective i'm i'm putting words into your mouth but i'm there's a certain amount of commonality between the way I approach this and the way that you do.

Speaker 41 What's hard to explain is that we're not being inaccessible.

Speaker 49 And in fact, the relationship we have with our loved one is what makes our dreaming possible.

Speaker 37 Right?

Speaker 35 They're the engine of it.

Speaker 42 They're not outside of it.

Speaker 41 It's their presence and support and structure and love and whatever that permits us to wander off

Speaker 45 and in our imagination and

Speaker 40 feel

Speaker 45 find comfort and joy in all of that.

Speaker 36 I don't know.

Speaker 36 It's a very hard thing to

Speaker 41 explain to someone that our inner lives are contingent on someone

Speaker 40 on the outside.

Speaker 33 Yes. You know, so finding love and then building a career from there

Speaker 33 felt the right sort of the right building blocks. And

Speaker 33 so that movie was the beginning of that. You know, when writing this movie, Labor of Love,

Speaker 33 it was coming from such an interesting place. And I was writing ahead of my abilities at that point.
It was just kind of going by this inspiration of love, I think.

Speaker 48 What do you mean by writing ahead of your abilities?

Speaker 33 You know, I didn't have as much craft at that time. This is oftentimes your career is an equation of craft and inspiration.
And so I was lacking in craft. And

Speaker 33 at 22, but the inspiration was at a 10. you know, that feeling when I was writing it, this feels beautiful.

Speaker 33 This feels lovely.

Speaker 33 I love this feeling, how it's coming out and how I can see the characters and in retrospect now, 30 years later, can see that

Speaker 33 I was really listening to the characters almost like a novelist and following it. And so the end result is I wrote this screenplay that

Speaker 33 ended up becoming a bidding war. from my parents' guest bedroom where me and my wife were living in the guest bedroom.
The best bedroom was pink. It was for my sister.

Speaker 33 it was just a, you know, we had to get out of here kind of feeling.

Speaker 33 And, and this script went out and there was a bidding warrant. Someone offered this amount of money and then that amount of money.
And it was crazy.

Speaker 33 And I was a kid and I'd run down and I'd be like, mom, they offered this, this amount of money. It's crazy.
And,

Speaker 33 but I'd only directed this little movie in India. And they saw it as a big, big movie.

Speaker 33 And this was back in an era of Hollywood where the entire system was geared at original movies.

Speaker 33 The system was built to nurture original movies and the spec screenplay markets, screenplays done on speculation,

Speaker 33 was the kind of gold rush.

Speaker 33 And so if there was an incredible screenplay that came out, everyone would read it immediately and it would go, this bidding war, because that was the food that was feeding the engine at that time to the movie theaters.

Speaker 33 And so I was luckily kind of grew up in an era where what I love to do, which is original movies, was really celebrated and promoted. And so everyone bid on it and we sold it to English Fox.

Speaker 33 I was attached to direct and then I flew out and I put on my graduation suit, which I didn't because I didn't have many suits.

Speaker 33 I wore my old suit and then they listened to me about how I would direct the movie. And then they subsequently fired me off the movie.

Speaker 33 And so it was devastating, just absolutely devastating.

Speaker 40 What did you do wrong in

Speaker 47 your pitch to be a director?

Speaker 33 that's really interesting a question i would say i wasn't a director yet i had more practice at writing than directing and of course sitting in a room telling a chairman of a studio how you make a film and they're asking certain questions and you know i i don't know if i had a chance at all uh you know before i walked in there in retrospect night you're now how old 53

Speaker 30 you you look

Speaker 35 At 53, you look 30.

Speaker 41 At 22, you must have looked 12.

Speaker 33 You're absolutely correct. You're absolutely correct.

Speaker 36 No one's going to give you $50 million to direct a movie when you look like a 12-year-old.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and I'm in this ill-fitting suit, which makes me even look younger because you're like, oh, did you wear your big brother's suit or whatever it was?

Speaker 33 I remember the feeling. I can remember the feeling pitching it to the chairman and the heads of the studio and.
and going, I'm not,

Speaker 33 I don't believe what I'm saying.

Speaker 33 And I'm guessing, I was like, basically, I was like, I don't know. I'm going to learn, you know, as I do this, because

Speaker 33 I can see it in my head, you know, so

Speaker 33 I'll learn. And

Speaker 33 they took me, I was very painful. Then I ended up, you know, they talked me into kind of pay, rewrite it for some other A-list directors of that time.

Speaker 33 So I had a chance to be in the room with some, you know, at that time, the top directors. And they would say, do this, do that.
And I just couldn't, I would rewrite it and it would get worse.

Speaker 33 In retrospect, some kind of of mojo curse I put on it. And

Speaker 33 it could never get, it never, it could never bloom into fruition. So there was lots of directors that tried, two or three directors that tried.

Speaker 33 So what was really weird about this movie, it represented some kind of, you know, connection with the universe. And I think for a little bit, I thought that was a one-off.

Speaker 33 And that it's never going to happen again. And that was the fear.
That screenplay just became something of a mythic thing for me, like, oh, I'll never get that back again.

Speaker 30 M.

Speaker 36 Night Shyamalan writes his masterpiece, and then he's haunted by it.

Speaker 35 More after the break.

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Speaker 49 Wait, so what's the next stage in the saga of Labor of Love?

Speaker 33 So Six Sense happens, right? I wrote it a few years later and wonderful outcome. Everyone wanted to make movies with me.
And I said to Fox, I would love to have that screen light back.

Speaker 33 They said, oh, do you want to make Labor of Love?

Speaker 33 And I said, Well, no, I'm thinking about making another movie, which was Unbreakable that I was writing at that time about comic books, even though no one had making comic book movies.

Speaker 33 And I thought no one would ever see this movie, but it was something that interests me. And I said, You know, I was really into genre now.
I was like, Okay,

Speaker 33 genre is my way. Labor of Love is a very,

Speaker 33 it's a very emotional movie. I think I have that as my base tendency to be emotional.
And I think until I found genre to

Speaker 33 balance it, I was too much for people. Cause like I start at a nine, like at emotion.

Speaker 33 If you and I are talking over drinks about something, I'll be, I'll be like, I'll be already emotionally to be, you know,

Speaker 33 there. And I think genre helped me balance that.
You know. You have to meet the audience where they are.
This is something I learned in my mid-20s.

Speaker 33 When you're telling a story, meet them where they are and don't lecture them and demand that they come to you. You come to them.
So you start tonally where they are.

Speaker 33 So, you know, it's a tough world and we have a little, we have cynicism. That's how we get through our lives.
You know, we balance that to protect our softer parts and

Speaker 33 genre does that. it comes in and and it balances i've i have this feeling about movie making or art that it has to have the right balance of light and dark.
And that's when it rings true.

Speaker 33 The love of a mother to a child has a selfish component.

Speaker 33 You have to have a controlling component. Then it rings true.
There's also the beauty, the pure love, you know, of a parent to a child.

Speaker 33 But if I can get both things in there, then it rings true and you start to see yourself in it. I think genre allows me to show you the light side, you know,

Speaker 33 because of that, I can can go very dark. I mean, I've killed off more protagonists than anybody.
This is like dark stuff.

Speaker 33 And, but that's because underneath I do feel the universe is a benevolent place and feel that from that. So genres helped me balance things.

Speaker 45 Is this fair to say that genre, particularly horror or the supernatural, it lowers the stakes in a certain way?

Speaker 36 What does it allow you to,

Speaker 33 what's the best way to describe the way it, it's, it's protective when you get really down to it i'm just this sentimental dude that's overly earnest when i speak to people they think it's gamesmanship it's not there's no game at all i i'm i love it i hate it i i'm terrified i'm i'll tell you openly you know everything and and

Speaker 33 when we do things like comedy and all this stuff those are ways to protect ourselves which i understand and i i can use as well And genre is if I can show you edgy, dark things and show you, because I do have an edgy dark side as well.

Speaker 33 I just deploy it at the right times. That allows me

Speaker 33 in the balance of things in the audience's eyes, in their emotional journey, it's earned then when I do the

Speaker 33 car scene in Sixth Sense with the mom and the child. You know, I've earned it.

Speaker 33 by by by titillating them and scaring them in a certain way. There's a balancing act that goes on, which I think is important for me to acknowledge that this is a conversation with the audience.

Speaker 33 That it's not just a lecture.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Labor of love is, are you saying there's no supernatural, it is a straight

Speaker 33 pretty much, yeah, just a straight.

Speaker 46 You say pretty much.

Speaker 43 What is it?

Speaker 43 Pretty much.

Speaker 33 The reason I say pretty much is there's a tiny bit of spirituality and love.

Speaker 33 And so that I do represent that in there, that things are bound a bit, that there's some

Speaker 33 inspirational, magical things that happen sometimes, you know, that's related to love. So that's all.
But there is no genre in it, as we would say.

Speaker 33 This opportunity came, I would say, you know, 15 years later, where I could make that movie with literally the best actor in the world and

Speaker 33 the person that I would want to make a movie with more than anybody. It was being squeezed between another movie that I was making for a big studio and I made the wrong decision

Speaker 33 and I didn't make it. And when I think back on it, now knowing me.

Speaker 50 Who is the actor?

Speaker 33 Well, I don't want to say just because.

Speaker 33 Just because,

Speaker 33 but because

Speaker 33 it's more about the emotional stuff that we're talking about rather than the kind of the titillation of it, of the names and things like that. If we can, because

Speaker 33 you'd be just because, you know,

Speaker 33 it meant so much to me and him, and I didn't do it. And it was literally because I just wasn't in the right place and I was making destructive decisions at that time.

Speaker 33 In retrospect, now having gone through, you know, iteration after iteration of who I am in front of the public eye, I

Speaker 33 with absolute certainty can tell you I should have made it at that time.

Speaker 40 Dig into a little bit more why you didn't.

Speaker 41 Is it on some level terrifying to actually

Speaker 45 make real something that you think of as being so

Speaker 49 perfect or something like if something comes in a lightning bolt, is it scary to

Speaker 33 it was a lot.

Speaker 33 No, I wish I could say it was something that defendable.

Speaker 33 It was literally, I think I wanted so much to be accepted. I was in a phase of my life where I was willing to,

Speaker 33 I think, give away the things that were precious to me to be accepted. And I was so tired of fighting the fight all the time, these original movies and, you know, doing things.

Speaker 33 And then I didn't have the protection of genre with that movie. It would just be me and this incredible actor.
And at that time, I felt like that's a very vulnerable thing.

Speaker 33 And that it's just an emotional movie and the world's going to just shit trash me and trash us and and that's the that was the fears but i was perhaps scared of giving up what i had had not very admirable reasons they were coming from wanting to be accepted from wanting money you know in in other forms or needing money or whatever it is and so you know the i i i i failed it because i was impure that's how i feel about it And

Speaker 33 should have 100% done it. This particular actor was, you know, sad by the decision.

Speaker 33 I would say maybe another eight years later, it came up again.

Speaker 33 And then this time, I was the one that said, hey, let's go make this. And the same actor wanted to do it and then went off and did another piece.
a big kind of thing that they were a part of.

Speaker 33 And it was successful, the thing they did. But a little bit of it was we missed missed each other you know we missed our moment you know a little bit

Speaker 43 but the movie wasn't done with m night shy malan yet not at all back with more after the break

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Speaker 20 How does the way you relate to the movie, how has it changed over the years?

Speaker 26 You're now, 30 years have gone by.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Do you look at it and think about it and see it differently now than you did when you were 22?

Speaker 33 Right now, I wouldn't change anything about it and we'd make it as a period piece in 1994. The music, the mores, the time, you know, which

Speaker 33 sadly feels incredibly innocent. It almost feels like, you know, let's take a stroll around the garden.
You know, oh, I'm so tired from the stroll. Let's lie down.

Speaker 33 It's like, you know, when we see a a period piece, we're like, wow, that really wore you out to go walk around the garden,

Speaker 36 you know.

Speaker 33 And that's how we feel about like 1994.

Speaker 36 Oh, we were thought we were really being really bad when we did this.

Speaker 33 You were just talking with your boys in the basement. How sweet.

Speaker 33 And you were just, all of you just talking about girls because you love, you know, how sweet, you know, like it feels that way.

Speaker 33 And I, when I think about it, it's very nostalgic of a time gone by now and a way people might have reacted.

Speaker 42 Because

Speaker 43 the way

Speaker 41 as the hero goes on his journey, as he's walking across the country, the country is responding to him in a way they wouldn't respond today. Is that your point?

Speaker 41 That in a kind of internet age, it would be different.

Speaker 33 Yeah, it's so hard now to unwind it and think of a moment when you didn't have access to every piece of information in the history of man.

Speaker 33 You don't know where your cousin is and where your uncle is and where your sister is right now?

Speaker 1 No, you don't, right?

Speaker 33 You know, 994, we didn't know where anybody was, right? And

Speaker 33 you get a letter or you would, if something happened, it would take a while for you to find out. All of those ideas of being present primarily is gone.

Speaker 33 Our understanding of what it is to be a human being

Speaker 33 is almost gone because we're never just here anymore. And this phone that's sitting near me as I'm doing this podcast is pulling me

Speaker 33 right now. I can feel it.
It's pulling me. So I'm partly here with you, but it's stolen my soul a little bit, you know? And that was just a different era.
And

Speaker 33 that's all part of

Speaker 33 that time period when I, you know, when I try to rewrite it, when I'm trying to make it better, I'm scarring it. It came out in one thing like that, you know, as this kid was just feeling something.

Speaker 40 When was the last time you read it?

Speaker 33 I probably read it.

Speaker 33 It came out

Speaker 33 a third time

Speaker 33 with this particular actor, a third time.

Speaker 33 It was four years ago. So I read it four years ago.

Speaker 33 Four years ago, when we talked about it again.

Speaker 50 What are the odds you'll actually do it?

Speaker 33 I'm just a strange creature, bro. So if I say to you absolutely never, as soon as we click off here, I'll probably go make it.
Right. I've thought about it a lot.

Speaker 33 Do you do it more as a as a ritual almost to honor that part of you and all of us that came from a pure place,

Speaker 33 regardless of its success, regardless of what would happen? There is a kind of a wise

Speaker 33 warning about labor of love, that there's something where you're blind about the labor.

Speaker 33 Oh, I always wanted to make that movie about blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, or I always wanted to write that thing. It's a labor of love for me.
That

Speaker 33 automatically means you're blind a little bit. Some massive, you know, blind spot exists there.
There is that wisdom, acumen to be careful of your labor of loves.

Speaker 33 That meant that you were kind of obsessed in a way about something. I don't know if that's the case here.
I feel.

Speaker 33 Even as we talk about it, like, you know, I could go do this in another year and do exactly the way I said it.

Speaker 33 It's funny. I had this conversation with someone in my office about it.
I said,

Speaker 33 I don't know if the world even wants to remember feeling this way anymore. It's painful to remember that we used to feel this way.
And

Speaker 33 it was okay and wonderful and celebrated and calm.

Speaker 47 When you say feel this way, you mean get swept up in what that man was doing.

Speaker 33 Well, yeah, this amount of the expression of love, you know, whereas today it's our relationship to our emotions

Speaker 33 is so

Speaker 33 being attacked. We're not supposed to have our own feeling anymore.
We're being manipulated by algorithms constantly

Speaker 33 and distraction. And so

Speaker 33 the AI world is already deciding how we live and experience our lives. And maybe that's the absolute reason to make it.
I don't know.

Speaker 33 And as I'm talking to you, this is probably the deepest conversation I've had about it because

Speaker 33 it is a kind of like, are we still, are you still torturing yourself about this movie, bro? After 30 years,

Speaker 33 this

Speaker 33 odyssey is that there's been opportunities, and there is one now of a wonderful filmmaker that wants to make it themselves.

Speaker 33 The same story.

Speaker 33 And whether I'm okay with that.

Speaker 1 Are you?

Speaker 33 Bro, I don't know. I don't know.
That feels like

Speaker 1 I should, I don't know.

Speaker 33 I don't know. I'm almost shutting down when you're asking me that question.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 I've actually shut down in that process too. So, you know, this is.

Speaker 35 So someone just called you up and said, someone famous calls you up and says, Knight,

Speaker 35 I've read the secret screenplay.

Speaker 33 Yes.

Speaker 47 How did this person get a hold of it?

Speaker 35 They just heard through the grapevine.

Speaker 33 Yeah, and it's happened before. It's happened before.
Somebody wants to make it.

Speaker 33 Every few years, somebody wants to make it. And

Speaker 33 I could just let it go.

Speaker 33 Just let go and

Speaker 33 let someone put their point of view on love. So it's this screenplay that represents the purest version of me that's on a page and it has been chasing me like a ghost or like haunting me.

Speaker 33 It started my career and

Speaker 33 I got to do all these amazing things and continue to have these incredible opportunities. And really, it's like a part of me that I betrayed at one point.
And now I can make it now.

Speaker 33 I mean, today I can make it right now. And I think probably with this same actor.
And even as you and I are sitting here, I have all these reasons that are holding me back.

Speaker 33 So it's it's so I don't know what this this screenplay is to me and what this movie is to me. Um, maybe it's the softest part of me.

Speaker 33 And and I'm so scared to show you guys that.

Speaker 46 My you said that your great fear at the time when you wrote it was

Speaker 40 that you would never have anything write anything so pure

Speaker 9 again.

Speaker 41 But listening to you, my fear about it is

Speaker 44 that

Speaker 50 had you made it,

Speaker 40 then what followed may not have happened.

Speaker 42 In other words, having as one of your very first

Speaker 47 screenplays something so perfect, like fueled all of this extraordinary

Speaker 47 productivity that came afterwards. And that had you made it and had it been a big success, maybe you would have been kind of paralyzed by that.

Speaker 42 Like the fact that

Speaker 49 it's unrealized allows you to keep going and

Speaker 42 right? If it's think about the what is the curse of the one-hit wonder? The curse of the one-hit wonder is someone who is unlucky enough to have written their greatest song first.

Speaker 47 It's just bad luck.

Speaker 41 And everyone looks at the second and the third ones and says, it's over for you.

Speaker 35 Well, it's not over for you. It's just out of order, right?

Speaker 42 Whereas

Speaker 48 the same thing only put the one-hit breakthrough hit 10 years into their career. And we think, oh, what a progression.

Speaker 42 Right. Towards.

Speaker 33 Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, I keep, you know, maybe you're right.
The unfinished nature of that keeps driving me.

Speaker 33 You know, the movie I'm just editing now and finishing, when I think of it, I have a little bit of magic feeling about it. And I'm like, oh, this is reminding me of Labor of Love.

Speaker 33 When it's feeling effortless and right,

Speaker 33 you're going, well, where did that come from?

Speaker 33 how how do you do that and you're like oh yeah that's how it felt at 22 but then here's the other fear i have that what if you made it and it wasn't magical

Speaker 33 then you wouldn't have you would also have destroyed this thing that you've been able to look at throughout your entire career well i can tell you if i at 22 i wouldn't have made a particularly great movie that at that moment i i think been uh

Speaker 33 you know, up and down, flawed and this and that. And then when we jumped forward to the first time with that, the most incredible actor, I wasn't in the right emotional space to have made it properly.

Speaker 33 Now that we're really getting serious about it, yeah. So that wouldn't have worked out either because I just was not where I am right now.

Speaker 47 One last question.

Speaker 36 What is your, what does your wife say?

Speaker 42 She was present at the creation.

Speaker 33 That's a great question.

Speaker 33 I would, I think she's seen me torture myself for 30 years about this. In her mind, you know, for a while, she kept asking me, why do you keep killing off the wife? You know, like in science.

Speaker 43 She's like, why do you keep killing off the wives?

Speaker 33 And I'm like, no, no, no, it's because I'm so scared to lose you. You know, she knows I wrote it for her.
And so it's kind of already in our lives because it already happened.

Speaker 33 It already existed and was made and was so lovely, you know. I have this check from back when we used to get checks from 20th Century Fox, and it was my first check that I got.

Speaker 33 And I have it framed, it's in my office.

Speaker 33 So if you come to my office, which you will, and it's there. And then if you go into the cafeteria, there's a poster of a mock-up of a poster that

Speaker 33 20th Century Fox made for Labor of Love. And that's hanging on my wall.
So on my wall is all the movies I made and a movie that wasn't made.

Speaker 36 It's your own ghost.

Speaker 36 You've created your own ghost.

Speaker 33 True.

Speaker 47 Night, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much.

Speaker 44 I really, really, really enjoyed this.

Speaker 33 You're so lovely. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 33 I was learning something about myself, too, as we were talking. You're a good therapist, man.
I was trying to get there.

Speaker 47 This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Tali Emlin with Ben Nadaf Haffrey. Editing by Sarah Nix.

Speaker 25 Original scoring by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 40 Engineering by Echo Mountain.

Speaker 39 Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 34 I'm Malcolm Glabo.

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