Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry.

ED ZWICK

My intention was to write about my experiences, obviously, but also I felt that there was a little bit of a counterintuitive approach, which is to talk about some of the inner experiences of the creative process and being a director, being a writer, and I felt that that would open the window a little bit wider. I liked that it wasn't just a behind-the-scenes look. It is that, and I think it's full of fun anecdotes and little reveals, but it is to be a real book. It presumes to be a memoir, like many of the memoirs that I have loved of creative people in the past.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I am just looking at your whole range because you have broad access to comedy, drama, and action films. And you just mentioned the subject of war, and it reminds me of some of the great performances that you've captured by the stars of our time, wonderful actors like Denzel Washington, almost at the beginning of his film career in Glory for which he won an Academy Award, or those who you describe as a force of nature, Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio, who you directed in Blood Diamond.

ZWICK

I've, like anyone, always had a fascination with movie stars, an attraction to the romance of who they are, men and women. So I wasn't immune, but what I realized very quickly is that I could acknowledge that and try to take those things that had always drawn me to the movies and provide them to the audience and have them really lift up these stories that I wanted to tell because finally, it was the stories themselves that I was trying to serve. There were ideas in those stories. Some of the ideas were about the characters and personal, but some of the ideas were a larger canvas. They were often about subjects. And the subjects could have been historical, they could have been political, they could have been social, cultural subjects, but they had some other agenda in them. And yet, that's not why people go to the movies. They go to the movies because they want to see relationships. They want to see - whether it's beautiful people or powerful people - they're drawn to relationships. In some sense, you’re creating a kind of stew where you're doing more than one thing at a time.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You write in chapter nine, titled Heroes:

The life in some actors’ eyes never seems to dim and the camera wants to know why. We call this being kissed by the angel. They radiate heat the way an engine in a sports car makes the air shimmer around it; we mortals are drawn to them in the hope of being touched by their magic. John Toll contends that certain faces let in the light and glow from within while others remain opaque and reflec- tive. He calls it movie skin.

ZWICK

They are remarkable teachers. They are often brilliant in their unique way, often not in a way that is schooled necessarily. They often don't have the language some of us who are more academically inclined have, but you underestimate their brilliance at your peril. And, in fact, you are missing an opportunity if you presume that they are just reading words. They are performing a very particular kind of magic in their process when they are great. And they save you constantly. They find solutions to your weaknesses in the words. They help you make implausible situations more plausible in your staging.

The Octane of Truth

We often talk in our work about the octane of truth, when you're at the gas station and they say, do you want low octane, middle octane, or high octane, and it's a very interesting set of decisions that one makes because it's actually not hard to know the truth of any circumstance or the truth of any story, but to actually partake of it, to actually come closer to it, and still be respectful of the audience's experience.

Because obviously, 100 percent octane, we would fall asleep within five minutes because nothing happens. You know, it's about trying to reconcile the compression of drama, the reductionist nature, how things stand in for other things. And in that regard, screenwriting and film are much more like poetry than they are like prose.

Things stand in for other things. A close-up, as someone looks at someone and things change, could have been three pages of an introspective narrative in Proust. A little bit of action that takes place in three minutes could have stood in for a war in Tolstoy. So some of it is sleight of hand, but it becomes about trying to understand how to use compression so as to give the simulacrum of real life, so as to give an approximation of verisimilitude.

And often that's something you learn because audiences do want to feel that they're seeing something that's real because when it's just pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, then it's comic books without exposition, without introspection, without internal sense. So it's trying to find some middle space between those, some liminal space.

On his longtime collaboration with Marshall Herskovitz

I went to film school, But at the end of two years, I think you've only begun the learning. I think it's very hard in school, and particularly in graduate school, to take in all that's coming at you because you're being barraged with information, and you're trying to listen, and you're trying to internalize. At the same time, you're very anxious, and you're very fervent, but you're also furtive about what can I do and how do I get ahead and how do I do this?

And I think those things are in contradiction, and what happens After you get out of school, as you begin to try to put into practice some of those things that they've been talking about, especially as you try and fail, unbelievably important to have somebody there with you or on off whom you can bounce ideas.

And notions or with whom you can analyze the thing that someone else has done, or you can analyze your own failures. It's a kind of continuing education that happens with a collaborator that as you grow, he grows. You grow together, and you have an observation about something, or he does, and you begin to work, and then you. It was never our intention to work. Our intention was just as friends. It never became about my idea or his idea, but it was the creation of a third idea that somehow evolved.

How AI is changing the way we produce and receive stories

The AI conundrum is one we're talking about because it does take from everything else and presumes to create a thing itself, but that's what all artists do. All artists do look at tropes from the past. They do assimilate a lot that has gone before them as the great painters always did, and before they took on some new course. But the difference is that that "committee" that you speak of, I think it's very much a legacy of Silicon Valley, where the creation of teams was to try to build consensus among a homogenous group of people. The building of consensus, I think, necessarily takes the edges off any kind of unique creative idea. And particularly, it may not be true when it comes to hardware because you're creating new technology, but when it comes to story, this idea of being pleasing and pleasing everyone, I think is a terrible and slippery slope because if you're not pissing somebody off at any moment, you're doing something wrong. And the idea that you have to just cater to this kind of middle ground for everyone, I think there's real danger there.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

We're facing a lot of conflict now, the climate crisis, young people have all these concerns. What for you is the importance of the arts? And what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

ZWICK

I think that for artists, there are ways, even small ways, that you can direct your art toward a consciousness of the world, and that consciousness could have as much to do with telling the truth or solving conflicts among people as it does solving the greatest of the world's problems. And I think that that's certainly part of it. And I think that's not copping a plea, which is to say that you shouldn't do those things that are more overt, having to do with voting, financing, marching, protesting, any of those more active things, obviously that you are inclined to do. But I also think that there are ways in art that you just do what you can with what you have. Whether that's writing a letter to a newspaper or an editorial or if it's finding a way in the context of a piece about something else that a character is talking about something. I'm not suggesting that art changes the political world, but it does contribute to a rising chorus of voices and consciousness that does create a paradigm shift.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Halia Reingold with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Halia Reingold.

The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier. Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).