A Curious Mind (9 page)

How does a person do that to another person?

Where does the strength come from to survive?

It takes enormous courage just to be able to retell that story to a stranger—to relive what was done, and also to absorb the reaction of the person hearing the story.

I was completely mesmerized by Veronica because of that courage, and also because of her self-possession and her dignity. Her refusal to be silent. She opened to me a world I would never have been aware of, and a whole set of human qualities and behaviors I would never have thought about.

Veronica de Negri gave me something critical in addition to the searing details of her story. She gave me a completely new sense of human resilience.

One of the concepts that really animates me is what I think of as “mastery.” I want to know what it takes to really master something—not just to be a police officer, but to be the chief; not just to be an intelligence agent, but to be head of the CIA; not just to be a trial attorney, but to be F. Lee Bailey. That's a quiet thread through my curiosity, and it's also a theme in some form of every one of my movies. The stories touch the whole range of human experience, I hope, but the central struggle is often about achievement, or the struggle for achievement. What does success look like, what does success
feel
like, to a father or the president of the United States, a rap musician or a mathematician?

Veronica de Negri really shattered the question of “mastery” for me. Of anyone I have ever met, she faced the most fearsome and enormous personal challenge. But it was also the most basic. She wasn't trying to solve a math equation. She was trying to survive. She was trying to survive in the face of smart, evil people who wanted to destroy her.

For Veronica, there was no help. There was no rescue. She
was up against the most horrifying opponent—well-armed fellow human beings. The stakes were total: her sanity and her physical survival. And the only person she could turn to was herself. She had to search inside herself for the skills she needed to withstand what was done to her. Nothing else was available—not even a view of what she was facing beyond the blindfold.

I met and talked to Veronica several times after that first meeting at Sting's house. Over time, what I came to understand was that she had found a capacity inside herself that most of us never go looking for, let alone have to depend on.

The only way to persevere is to have the capacity to calmly separate yourself from what is being done to you.

Veronica figured out that to withstand being tortured, she had to take herself out of the reality of what was being done to her. You slow your brain down, you slow yourself down. People talk about being in “flow,” when they're writing, when they're surfing or rock-climbing or running, when they're lost in doing something completely absorbing.

What Veronica told me is that to survive being tortured, hour after hour, every day for eight months, she had to get into a state of flow as well, but a flow state of an alternate reality, that has its own narrative. That's how she survived. She couldn't control the physical world, but she could control her psychological reaction to it.

It's a mechanism, and it's how she saved herself. In fact, it's a storytelling mechanism. You have to find a different story to tell yourself to take you out of the torture.

Veronica's
story is so compelling that we tried to capture it in a movie,
Closet Land
.
Closet Land
has just two characters—a woman and her torturer. It was always going to have a small audience, because it is so intense, so unrelenting. But I wanted to do a movie that gets viewers inside the mind of someone who is being tortured. Torture takes place all over the planet, and I wanted people to be able to see it.

What I learned from Veronica, her sense of mastery, connects to the psychology of the characters in many other movies and shows. When I first read astronaut Jim Lovell's account of the explosion and crisis on the Apollo 13 capsule, I couldn't really grasp the details of the spacecraft, the orbital mechanics, the issues with fuel and carbon dioxide and skipping off the top of Earth's atmosphere. What I connected with immediately was the sense Lovell conveyed of being trapped, of being in a physical setting, also a life-or-death setting, where he and his fellow astronauts had lost control. They had to adopt a mind-set like Veronica's—they had to create an alternate narrative—to have the psychological strength to get themselves back to Earth. I think that movie, too, owes a lot to Veronica de Negri.

You might expect someone who had survived what Veronica was put through to be discouraged, to be cynical, to lack a certain basic hope.

She isn't like that at all. She's vibrant. She's a person of intellect, and obviously a person of inner strength. She isn't cheery or buoyant, but she has great energy, fierce energy.

And she has this incredible human capacity to rely on her
own psychic strength to survive. That's what is so urgent to me about people's emotional makeup. What saved Veronica was her character, her personality, the story she was able to tell herself.

•  •  •

CURIOSITY CONNECTS YOU TO
reality.

I live in two overlapping worlds that are often far from reality: the world of Hollywood show business, and the world of storytelling. In Hollywood, we have a sense of being at the center of the world. Our creative work touches everyone in the United States, as well as a huge part of the rest of the world. We deal with actors and directors who are famous and, in Hollywood, powerful—powerful in that they can demand large paychecks, they can command armies of staff and technicians, they can pick their work, they can create whole new worlds from scratch, and they can specify all kinds of quirky elements about things like the food they'll eat. Our projects involve huge sums of money—both the dollars to get a project made in the first place, and the dollars they make when they succeed in theaters and on TV. The millions are often in the triple digits, and we're now firmly in the era of the billion-dollar film franchise, and the era of the billion-dollar acting career.
²

So Hollywood absolutely has a huge sense of importance about what we do, and we have a huge sense of importance
about the people who do it. It's possible to lose track of the difference between the stories we're telling, with as much vividness and texture as we can possibly create, and the real world. For while the money is real—the risks are real, and they are often large—the rest of it is, of course, showbiz, make-believe.

A comedy about the New York City morgue—
Night Shift—
doesn't involve any dead bodies.

A TV drama about producing a sports news show—
Sports Night—
involves no sporting events, no sports figures, no news.

A movie about the brutal reality of drug smuggling—
American Gangster
—involves no actual drugs or brutality.

Even in a great love story, no one typically falls in love.

Just as important, storytelling itself is not reality. That may seem obvious, but it's not at all. When you come home from work and tell your wife or husband “the story” of your day, you reshape those nine hours to highlight the drama, to make your own role the centerpiece, to leave out the boring parts (which may be eight hours of the nine). And you're telling a real story about your real day.

In the movies and on TV, we're always trying to tell stories that are true—whether it's
Frost/Nixon
, about real people and real events, or
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
, about a child's fantasy. The stories need to be “true” in emotional terms, true in thematic terms, not necessarily true in factual terms. For any movie that purports to tackle a set of real events, there's now typically a website detailing all the things we “got
wrong”—you can read about the departures from reality in
Gravity
and
Captain Phillips
. We released
Apollo 13
in the summer of 1995—before Google was on the Internet—but you can read about the ways the movie differs from the factual story of the rescue at a half dozen websites.
³
You can even read about the differences between 2014's movie
Noah
with Russell Crowe, and the biblical Noah, that is, the differences between the movie and the “real” story of a mythic biblical figure.
⁴

The truth is, we want to tell great stories, captivating stories, and so we tweak the stories all the time—in fact, when we're making a movie or a TV show, we tweak the stories every day, while we're making them—in order to get more immediacy, or to move things along more quickly. We tweak them to make them seem more realistic, even when we're actually deviating from the “facts.” We're all storytellers, and in about the third grade we start to learn the difference between a story that is true and a story that is factually correct.

It is very easy to get caught up in the urgency and the charisma of Hollywood. It's a hermetic world (it doesn't help that we're in California, far from a lot of the big decision making in Washington, DC, and New York City). It's very easy to get caught up in the world of episodic storytelling.

Curiosity pulls me back to reality. Asking questions of real people, with lives outside the movie business, is a bracing reminder of all the worlds that exist beyond Hollywood.

You can make as many movies as you want about war or black ops or revolution or prison. They're just movies. What
was done to Veronica de Negri was not a movie, it was real—her pain and her survival.

•  •  •

WHEN YOU WATCH A
movie that is completely engrossing, what happens to you? I'm talking about one of those movies where you lose track of time, where everything fades away except the fate of the characters, and their world, on screen. One of those movies where you walk out onto the sidewalk afterward, blinking, reentering reality, thinking, Wow, it's a Sunday afternoon in spring. Whew.

When you binge-watch the latest episodes of
Arrested Development
or
House of Cards
, what causes you to touch the
PLAY
button just one more time, six times in a row?

When you read a book, what keeps you in the chair, turning pages way past the moment when you should have set the book down and gone to sleep?

National Public Radio knows exactly how riveting its radio storytelling can be. NPR has figured out that people often park, turn off the engine, then sit in the car in the driveway, waiting to hear the end of a particular story that isn't quite finished. NPR calls these “driveway moments.”
⁵
Why would anyone put the last three minutes of a story on NPR ahead of going inside to dinner and their family?

Curiosity.

Curiosity keeps you turning the pages of the book, it tugs
you along to watch just one more episode, it causes you to lose track of the day and the time and the weather when you're in a theater seat. Curiosity creates NPR's “driveway moments.”
⁶

Curiosity is a vital piece of great storytelling—the power of a story to grab hold of your attention, to create the irresistible pull of that simple question: what's going to happen next?

Good stories have all kinds of powerful elements. They have fascinating characters caught in revealing or meaningful or dramatic dilemmas. They have talented acting, good writing, and vivid voices. They have plots that are surprising, with great pacing and settings that transport you to the story's location. They create a world into which you can slip effortlessly—and then lose yourself.

But it's all in service of one goal: Making you care. You can say you care about the characters or the story, but all you really care about is what's going to happen next. What's going to happen in the end? How is the tangle of plot lines going to be untangled? How is the tangle of human relationships going to be untangled?

A story may or may not make its point memorably. It may or may not be entertaining or compelling, funny or sad, upsetting, even enraging.

But none of those qualities matter if you don't get the whole story—if you don't actually watch the movie or read the book. If you don't stick around, it doesn't matter what the point of the story is. To be effective, a story has to keep you in the
chair—whether you're holding a Kindle, or sitting in your car with your hand on the radio knob, or sitting in the multiplex.

Inspiring curiosity is the first job of a good story.

How often have you started reading a newspaper or magazine story with a great headline, about a topic you care about, only to give up after a few paragraphs, thinking, That story didn't live up to the headline.

Curiosity is the engine that provides the momentum of good storytelling. But I think there's an even more powerful connection between them.

Storytelling and curiosity are really indispensable to each other. They certainly reinforce and refresh each other. But they might actually do more. Curiosity helps create storytelling. And there's no question storytelling inspires curiosity.

Curiosity is fun and enriching personally, in isolation. But the value and the fun of curiosity are magnified by sharing what you've learned. If you go to the zoo and see the new panda cubs, or you go to Florence and spend three days looking at Renaissance art, there's nothing like coming home and telling your family and friends “the story” of your trip. We read aloud the most amazing tidbits from the newspaper over breakfast. Half of what's on Twitter is literally people saying, “Look what I just read—can you believe this?” Someone's Twitter stream is a tour through what that person thinks is interesting enough to share—a journey through their version of clickable curiosity.

If you go all the way back in time to the earliest human
tribes, some kind of storytelling was indispensable to survival. The person who discovered the nearby spring of water had to communicate that. The mother who had to snatch her wandering child from the stalking cougar had to communicate that. The person who first found wild potatoes and figured out how to eat them had to communicate that.