Tony Gilroy
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The... What always, why is, why, not just Hollywood, you can sort of say, why has Hollywood for the last hundred years been vaguely, you know, been progressive or been liberal? I think it's a much larger, I'll go farther and say, why is almost all literature, why is almost all art that involves humans trend to progressive? The, let's stick with Hollywood.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
You can't make a living as an actor or as a writer or a director doing, the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you're going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It's just baked in. You're trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And what is it like to look from this? And People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job. And that is what actors do.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I have to play, I'm going on Broadway, I'm playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I'm playing the slave. I'm playing the fisherman. I'm playing the nurse. I'm the murderer. You have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of material to be compared with. So it's a big thank you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
gives you a more, what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to. And I don't see how you can buy, if you're going to reissue the Hardy Boys or something, or try to twist a knot and say that Melville or the Coen brothers made a piece of right-wing art because you sort of see something in there. I think it really misses the larger point of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
of the struggle that that movement is going to be up against. Does that make any sense to you?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So the empathy for events is what you're saying?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
You're asking me why... I'm saying just the act of the job, just the act of the day-to-day work puts you... It doesn't matter. The ideology may be... There may be exceptions across the spectrum. But in general, the act of pretending... to be someone else or, you know, many actors don't like to use the word pretending and writers don't like to use the word pretending.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The act of inhabiting or becoming someone else in any iteration, in any historical setting, just that simple transformation and the work that goes into that and until the point where you can access it immediately, that act is, I'm so – I'm very eager to put it in a religious context for you because I know what a strong flavor that is on this show.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
It's perhaps not religious, but it is an act of transformation that is – it's more than a magic trick. Right. And it's not – it doesn't necessarily put you in an ideological – it doesn't cast your vote, but it does open your mind in a way that forces you to think twice about the person who's sitting next to you on the bus. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't think it's a subtle picture, and I think it's doing what, what do I come back with? Let's talk about In the Heat of the Night. Let's talk about In the Heat of the Night for one second. Just to pick a... Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, In the Heat of the Night, the Rod Steiger character, the Southern Sheriff, couldn't be more of a cliche as the movie starts, couldn't be more of a living caricature of what we all expect and lives on those expectations. As the movie tracks along...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And as some great writing and great directing and great acting gets done, you gradually become to realize that everybody involved in that picture is absolutely as invested in him as they are in Sidney Poitier. And they're absolutely invested in that character as much as they are in any other character. And the whole thing is alive. And the difference between Shape of Water is it's a...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
It wants to be gothic. I'm not sure what Guillermo was going for there. I'm sure there was a different kind of movie. But when people really care about it, they get there, I think.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, I'm always trying to do something that I haven't seen before that is gonna be unusual. So no, I had no, I was very much not into any other model. I was very into striking new ground. And the other thing that I was being offered was a five-year piece of history on that calendar that you probably know pretty well. I think you're a big fan.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I'm just trying to get you. All right. Well, let me let me let me respond to that. I think you might have you might have an opening statement in on and or because it is essentially there's a lot of politics and and fascism is identified. And but I just it's funny. I I just saw Clayton for the first time in 18 years the night before last. Really? They had a screening in LA.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Yeah, and they had a show print and we're out promoting Andor and they tied it in with that. I hadn't seen it in 18 years. I went in a packed theater just two nights ago and saw it again. So it's fresh in my mind. I really don't—I'm going to really push back against left-wing on that picture.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't understand at all what is left or right about poisoning people with a pesticide and lying about it. I don't think anybody on the right wants to be—if I was—let's keep my politics out of it, but I can't see myself ever in any iteration of myself identifying with the corporation that has— been fighting a class action shoot for poisoning people.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Right, but that's what... But wait, Tilda Swinton's character is so... She's such a lost person. She has to practice being herself. She's completely... If there's a political element about the movie, I think, at all, it's Tilda Swinton... trying to falsely approximate what she thinks may be male corporate behaviors.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
You might be able to make an argument about that, but like, who wants to defend pesticides? I don't think it's left or right at all. I think it's about people... I mean, I think I'm a moralist, if you want to know the truth. I mean, in the number one definition, not the number two definition. But I think I really, in the end, I think there's a moral code that I have.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And I think that gets expressed a lot. But it's impossible for me to see Clayton as an ideological thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I have that five-year tranche of history that takes you up to the first scene in Rogue One.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, well, that's a... I mean, if you look at my complete CV, it's pretty chaotic, and you could tell that I... As to go back to what we said before, I don't really want to do anything that I've done before. I really wanted to make Duplicity. I really had a guess making it. I went from there to Legacy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I really tried to give... I'd been on the Bourne franchise for many years, and that's its own shambolic success, and I wanted to give them a... a Marvel universe in a way. We really had a way of doing that. There was just too much bad blood and too much confusion that it didn't work.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The life of a screenwriter, the life of a writer-director, I have not been able to pick and choose what I've wanted to do. Well, that's the core of the question.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Go ahead. You stopped going to the theater. You stopped going to the theater. You with a capital Y stopped going to the theater.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Totally. No, I mean, the... Man, I've been around so long. I've seen this whole thing. I've seen all these dynastic changes happen and ridden it through. The economics are just what they are. And Michael Clayton existed in that moment where the model on that movie is if I could get a movie star whose full freight price – was basically the cost of the movie. And they do the movie for free.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I had a movie. I mean, even at that point, if George is going to come in, I think the movie costs $20. I think George was getting $15, $20 at that point. And he waives his fee. He owns the picture. That's how that movie gets made. That model began to degrade over time. And now it's an impossibility. I mean, now Clayton is absolutely a streaming show.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
There are no movie stars anymore. No, there are no movie stars. And so all of these things have changed. So I... My father was in the same business. My brothers are in the same business. I have grown up in this my whole life. It's prenatal for me. And one of the major, most important things carved in stone that I know, it does no good to complain about the weather, man. You got to go out.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
You got to see what's there. Now, I don't want to... I grew up, my brothers and I grew up, my friends and I grew up with a generation of writers before us, great writers and great producers and directors and whatever. But they... many of them became embittered by the changing landscape and the changing topography of what had happened. And that's a lesson that I've taken away. I'm staying flexible.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I want to work. I want to be obsessed. I want to work on something that I'm into.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't, man, better, I don't know. I think there's a couple of really significant things. I mean, just personally, I have a movie that I'm hoping to get greenlit very soon. That's very much, that'll go back and direct. And it's about movie music. And it's certainly not Clayton that it's a thriller, but it's very much in the same scale. And it's very ambitious and unusual.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Well, that was the offer. The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity of...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And it's, if I get to make it, I think you'd say, oh, this is the thing I was talking about. But- Good. What's new and good? I'll tell you what's good. What's good is time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The two major developments, I would say, are the best developments in recent years is one is Tony Soprano, because prior to Tony Soprano, every writer who ever went into a pitch meeting or ever dealt with an actor, there was always a note, can we make this character more sympathetic? How do we make Ross more sympathetic? Should we give you a dog?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
If you had a dog, if you had a dog there, a puppy, it would be a lot better. After Tony Soprano, people really began to realize something that had already been staring at them, which is the characters need to be fascinating and have to be relatable in some way, but they have to be fascinating more than anything else. And sympathetic wasn't the characteristic that everybody wanted.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think that's a huge tectonic... I think the other development that's probably more significant is time. The ability to tailor the size of the canvas or build a house to the lot appropriately is an incredibly liberating creative development. That's transformative. I have a story. Does it really want to fit into a three hours? Does it really want to fit into seven hours?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Does it really want to be 24 episodes? Is it really just a movie? Is it, I think how shows are delivered, time will now be, it's just, I mean, I can't stress how, it's almost as if you added perspective to painting. It's Jado or something. It's really like, that's a really major development. Now, all that said, all that happiness and everything that's great, Then I listened to your AI podcast.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
To use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I'd done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff, that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I was talking to people in LA the last couple of days. I've heard some just absolutely amazing, gothic, dire information or prognostication about AI. I don't know how to deal with that. I don't know how to think about it. I don't know what you did with that. When you finished that podcast, what did you think when you were done with that podcast?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Did you want to go out to the parking lot and scream or what?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, I think that's—I'll talk about that for one minute, but I think it's subsidiary to, like, well, maybe people will have nothing else to do to watch because they won't have any jobs and they won't have anything— I mean, or maybe it's a Chinese AI nuclear race. No, I mean, it's so terrifying that I don't know. There won't be a movie business. I don't know. I don't want to be—I mean—
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
One of my – I think a personal philosophy that I've – it's not something – again, it's not an agenda I put in. I find this – you find out forensically what you really think when you go out and sell your picture. It's really an odd thing. And over time, I've really become more aware in these kinds of conversations and post facto what I've really been doing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
When are you going to be able to have, as we've ended up with, a 1,500-page—I think of it as a novel, really, a 1,500-page novel— that is trying to deal with as many aspects of authoritarianism and fascism and colonialism and rebellion and coalition and sacrifice and all of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And one of the things I feel I've really been doing – I think human behavior and human insecurities and just all the things that make us chaotic, complicated beings has always had a corrosive effect on every technology and weapon and everything that's been thrown in its way. I think it's like water. It leaks down and it rusts.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
It's managed to wonderfully rust out all of the things that have been thrown at it before. I don't know. if this is one that we can beat. And in your scenario, maybe it's true. Maybe live theater will become just this cult-like thing. Maybe there'll be some huge, incredible renaissance of return to an acoustic community in every way, shape, or form. I don't know.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But I am not sanguine about the next corner we're going to turn. And... That's something we have no frame of reference for that. So absent that, I would try to be optimistic, I suppose.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Well, I give the same advice. All these people come and kids come and whatever. I mean, now it's simple.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, but have something to say. It's just people can't be doing this job because they think it's cool or the money's good or whatever. I mean, there's no point in this if you don't have something to say. The optimistic other thing is what do people talk about everywhere? They talk about what are you watching? What are you seeing? Did you see this? What episode are you on? The amount of narrative...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
that is being consumed and the, I guess the leisure time liberation and the accelerated, you know, just the delivery systems that can bring it to you. I mean, narrative is an essential food group to the human experience and it has never not been thus. Will that go away because it's a machine doing it? I don't know. How will machines do it? Will they do it better? Will people accept that?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, I mean, a lot of times I'll tell writers if they're telling me, you know, one of the things I always say is it's really good to tell your story if you're working on something. It's a campfire story. I mean, the best writers are people who could sit down.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I could sit down and I really think confidently with a little bit of lead time and a vodka in my hand at a campfire, I can hold your attention. I can really hold your attention. That's really valuable. That never ends. So that seems to be proven.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The five years that I've been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The Emperor's building the Death Star. The rebellion on Gorman was a front from the start, a cover to strip mine the planet for some mineral that they need.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically. There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over. And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously who wouldn't even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There are a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells, I guess, and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And at the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true victory of the rebel alliance. I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make... a revolution like this happen on both sides.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that when it's done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice, and by the time it consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately comes after its own... It consumes its own proponents.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
That's been the... It's just reading about the last days of Mussolini a month ago. And it's just like right out of the... People get lost and get hung out to dry. So I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who've cast their lot with the empire who get burned by it all. Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never... I mean, I never do.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I mean, my education is very, very spotty and not college graduate, but completely autodidactic. I grew up in a house with an amazing library, and I've been a very active reader my whole life. And I've done just an incredible number of deep dives in my life where I've become obsessed with all kinds of different things, and I've made my own syllabus, and I've I mean, I don't know.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I probably read Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette when I was 15 or 16 years old and started a French Revolution jag. And then, you know, and I probably revisited that. I probably revisited the French Revolution half a dozen times in my life. And probably the last thing I read was, oh, there's a great novel, Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Amazing book. And so I've done that, and I was obsessed with the Russian Revolution. And then the literature on that has expanded over time. And the show trials. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen House of Government. It's just an incredible book. And at different times, different things would come out. Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, the Roman Revolutions. And...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
So, yeah, I mean, my syllabus for the show is, it just goes back too far and too deep. It's just something I've always been fascinated in. I don't think of the show as a left-wing show, and I don't want you to think that I came on the show, I sort of said before, I saw the opportunity to use all this material and to dig into all these things, but that is not how I write.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
It's completely antithetical to the way I write. I write very, very small. I trust my instincts are going to take me someplace larger if I'm doing it right. But it's really almost exclusively all about character. I plot through dialogue. I go very, very deep. And you can see how many characters I have and how many I'm carrying. And I... I don't think of it as a pushing or promoting or anything.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
In fact, the ideology... But you're rooting.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But there's no ever – what's fascinating is there's no – and particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of particularly for – and using Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen, as the sort of – and Forrest Whitaker's character as sort of the original gangsters and the difficulty of integrating – the inceptors of radicalism, into a coalition.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But I never... There's never anybody, I don't think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than to please leave us alone, stop killing us, stop destroying our communities, don't build the Death Star and kill us. There's not a...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I never have a character I don't think stand up and say, this is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I'm with everybody on the show. I have to... I truly, without sounding like a T-shirt or a cliche, I mean, I have to live through every single one of them to do it properly. I have to really feel for every single person in the show. And there's no shortcut to that other than to empathetically dive into every person's point of view and every person's insecurities. And I'm as invested...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
in Partagas and Dedramiro and Cyril as any of the other characters in the show.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
Yeah, exactly. I don't have the luxury. That sounds so glib. I just don't... I don't have any other way to work other than to fully be with everybody that I'm writing for and taking care of. And then as a dramatist, I also have actual...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
human beings who are doing this that are you know vivid and alive for me and so your your empathetic response to the character is also then as a as an element of transference to the people that are playing the parts and i don't know any other way to do it i just go back to your last point about before we move on from it yeah i think if there's any ideology in the show at all
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
that is expressed, that seems consistent through the whole thing. And it is something that I think, and I don't know where that, I don't know where it lines up. I think that, I think it would probably be just as confusing for you to try to make a left-right marker on it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
But I feel the disruption of community and all the varieties of community, whether it's on a large scale with colonialism, if it's on a small scale with a city and a town or a family or the empire in the show, is consuming and destroying communities everywhere.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
And the concept of community is the universal, I think that's the universal flag that I can fly all the way through the whole show and feel comfortable with.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I don't know if I want to answer that by giving a list of shows. I'm going to push deeper on that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
I'm going to push deeper on that. Um... Like I heard, you know, I had to study up a little bit to come on a podcast like this with an interview like this.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What Makes Art ‘Left Wing’?
No, the bar is higher. No, seriously, man. This is a trickier conversation than most of the ones I have to have on this. I listened to the podcast that you did with the, I don't know the gentleman's name, the one who's trying to revive the vibe shift into the... Yep, Jonathan Kieperman. Right wing, yeah.