Talkin' Cinematic Philosophy with Steven Bernstein (Monster, Like Water for Chocolate, GRQ)

Cody: 00:00:29

Welcome to Box Office Pulp, your one stop podcast for movies, madness and moxie. I'm your host, Cody, and joining me tonight are my co host, Mike. Say hello, Mike.

Mike: 00:00:37

Hello.

Cody: 00:00:38

Beautiful. And Jamie. Say hello, Jamie.

Jamie: 00:00:40

Hello.

Cody: 00:00:41

Oh, thank God you came through. Had me scared.

Jamie: 00:00:45

Just the sound of crickets getting louder and louder.

Cody: 00:00:48

Yeah, I half expected. Anyways, more importantly, we're lucky enough tonight to have with us a professional screenwriter, author, cinematographer, podcaster and director.

I'm probably missing a few in there as well.

Feel like he can do it all, but you know him from his work on movies like Bulletproof, the Water boy, Scary Movie 2, White Chicks, Monster, just to name a few. There's way more out there, you know him. Plus he has his own podcast filmmaker and fans. We have with us tonight Steven Bernstein.

Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for hanging around as we've settled our technical difficulties.

Steven Bernstein: 00:01:21

No, my great pleasure. And I've seen a few technical difficulties along the road, so no worries, I'd imagine.

Cody: 00:01:27

Yeah, you've probably seen something much worse than this.

Before we really get into this, I do just have to mention I was talking to my girlfriend when this was set up and I was telling her I was trying to prep for all this and she asked, oh, what, what movies has he done?

And I'm listing through your stuff and I start with the more prestigious, you know, award winning films and then I'm going down to like the comedy favorites. I'm just reading through and I go, okay, well you know, he's done White Chicks, he's done Porky Romano. And she like gasps.

It turns out Corky Romano and White Chicks, the two movies she says she has seen the most in her life. So I think if she had her way, she would be doing this interview and I'd be sitting on the couch.

Steven Bernstein: 00:02:01

Well, I, I, I don't know what to say.

White Chicks, I get no matter where I, I go to universities and lectures and I try to get very sort of pretentious and talk about the, the artistry of monster or Noah Bambex movies or some of the dark films I did in the UK before I moved to the US but the first question from everybody is always white chicks. But Corky Romano, that's, that's the first I've heard. I'm glad it's got A fan. That's fantastic. So delighted.

Cody: 00:02:25

She absolutely loves it. And she just wanted to make sure you knew that, you know, there's at least one hardcore quirky head out there still.

Steven Bernstein: 00:02:33

That's fantastic. She could probably be president of the fan club, because I. I think that position is probably available. It does.

It does have some great moments in that film. And, my God, we have Peter Falk in that movie. So how cool is that? So it had its moments at the very least.

Cody: 00:02:47

Yeah, you can always brag about that.

Steven Bernstein: 00:02:49

Yeah, yeah, no question. And look, I worked with Marlon Brando on.

Marlon Brando was originally going to be the priest in the Pastiche, the satire of the Exorcist in Scary two. And he came in and we worked together for two days. And I've got pictures of me working with Marlon Brando, and we bonded.

And he has a great affinity for when I was then a cinematographer and we talked about lighting and movies he's worked on, and just a charming, smart, remarkable, obviously charismatic individual. And then I guess they wanted to come back for more days, and then they won more money. They paid him a million dollars for those two days.

And then I guess he didn't come back and shot it with. With somebody else. James Wood was also great, but very, very different.

uld have been like the God of: 1960

Cody: 00:03:46

You got them all.

Steven Bernstein: 00:03:46

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jamie: 00:03:48

You could have told yourself as a child, one day you will film Henry Winkler.

Steven Bernstein: 00:03:52

Yeah, and Henry Winkler as well. That's right. Yeah, exactly. It just said I got everybody in their dotage.

Doesn't mean they weren't still great, but, you know, not when they were young. I. If someone.

I guess when someone would look on the call sheet and see they were working with Steve Bernstein, they knew that near the end of their careers.

Cody: 00:04:12

mography. Right. So Corky was: 2001

Steven Bernstein: 00:04:32

Kind of strange. I mean, I. Look, I was trained to the BBC. I've started doing all heavyweight sort of Shakespearean drama.

I worked in theater in the UK again, very serious weighty heavy stuff. My writing up to the theater was very dark and sort of grimly nihilistic or existential.

So not theoretically your first choice for Corky Romano, a White Chicks or Scary Movie. But I didn't really understand the way the American film industry worked. I never like to use the term industry.

I prefer to call it art form, but in this case I will call it industry.

And I had just shot like whatever, Chocolate, which became the highest grossing foreign language film of all time and again, kind of a romantic but heavyweight piece of, of filmic literature, you might say. And so I figured, right, this is my opportunity to move to Los Angeles. Everybody does, right?

So I came out and got an agent, manager and all the rest of it and was offered all these jobs, some independence, really worthy independence, which maybe I should have done. But then I was offered a lot of studio films and the way the studios work is they want a name.

If you're a middle level executive, you better hire someone who is just successful because that way if your project goes belly up, goes south, goes bell end, whatever team we want to use, it goes wrong. And your senior says to you, we're going to fire you. That film's terrible. Why did you hire this guy?

And you can say, hey, that guy just shot the highest grossing foreign language film of all time or that that guy just won an Oscar. You get a free pass. So once you've done something successful, they want to hire success.

And I got hired to do Strength of like Water Chocolate comedies. I think the first one was maybe Bulletproof with Ernest Dickerson and Adam Sandler and Damon Waynes.

And it was an, a big action but big comedy thing as well. Became friends with both Adam and Damon and they went to their respective camps and said, oh no, we like this guy.

You know, he's a, he's a thinking cinematographer. Not that all cinematographers aren't thinking, but that was my rep.

So then I started getting hired for comedies, thinking comedies doesn't matter and go back to drama whenever I want.

Again, it doesn't work that way because not only do they want to hire the guy that's been successful recently, they want to hire the guy that's shooting the exact same thing that they're about to shoot. So nothing could be said. So why would you hire a comedy guy to do a drama?

If after doing Corky Romano, someone hired me for a serious movie, the films failed, they would say to that executive, you hired the DP from Corky Romano. What drugs are you on? Or you know, half baked, we would Know what drugs they were on. So I was a little bit trapped.

But also I gotta say, I kind of loved it as well because Marlon Damon, Keenan, Kevin Keenan in particular, the Wayans are just great people to work with. So I did four films with them and the sets were delightful. We were laughing all the time. They were lots of fun.

And you know, White Chicks is, no matter what anyone says, actually a pretty good movie. And it works because it's well crafted. Adam Sandler is one of the most delightful human being stars on the planet.

And again, a really happy production of Waterboy. And again we're working with some Kathy Bates who I also worked with on Dolores Claiborne.

So serious actors, Oscar winning Oscars or nominated Oscar nominated actors. And so for me to work at that scale, large sums of money, huge crews and really good actors and to be laughing all the time wasn't a bad Life.

Led to SWAT, which was all action and 23 cameras and blowing things up left and right and again, another type of dream. So how does that connect to Monster? Well, you acquire a skill set. First of all, you know how to use every piece of equipment.

You learn management techniques, you learn leadership techniques about how best to facilitate your crew members, how best to work with actors, how to nurture and facilitate and garner and to curate things on set to get the best out of people. And when you can do that on whatever type of film, the next film you work on, you're going to be better at it.

And that's how I came to work on Monster. I was actually working on SWAT when and we just crashed a plane or crashing a three quarter size airplane on the second street bridge in Los Angeles.

And we had I think eight Moscow lights, you know, Moscow lights, those giant telescoping lights. So, so we were lighting most of each. Los Angeles, Los Angeles.

We had I think 300 squibs which are those little plates that explode hidden on the stunt people. We had 40 or 50 stunt people. We had a lot of cars with spark guns.

So as it went by it looked like they're getting hit by these, by these machine guns. We had Samuel Jackson, we had Colin Farrell, we had the three quarter sized airplane.

And we were pulling this thing down with enormous cable and then which we paint out later. And I had 23 camera units working for me when we do the stunt sequence. So you would think, boy's dream, right? This is what everybody wants.

And I, I don't think I was ever so depressed. Because if there's one thing worse than not getting what you Want, it's getting what you want and not being happy.

And even though they were paying me, can I say shitload? Probably not. But as they pay me a shitload of money, I mean absurd, obscene sums of money.

So I was buying things that I never wanted and then taking more movies to pay for the things I never wanted, which is the story of Los Angeles.

And in the middle of that, on the bridge, I got a call from Clark Peterson, the first person I wrote to when I moved to la, saying, hey, I'm a dp, you haven't heard of me. I shot a film called Like Water for Chocolate. Looking for jobs in America. I wrote to 400 people and Clark was one of the two people that responded.

And he said, look, we're in Florida. This production we're on is becoming unstuck.

There's a first time director you've not heard of, an actress you probably haven't heard of, but they want to speak to you on the phone about. I said, well, I got another two weeks on swat. I don't know if I can do it. All right, I'll speak to them.

And I spoke to Patty Jenkins and she's very charming and this actress. And they were very dedicated to their vision of the film. And I read the script and I thought, well, it's small, but it's about something.

And I go, what the hell, I'll fly out there.

And even though they were paying me about 1 50th, what I was getting on SWAT and I arrived and fired some people, got rid of a lot of equipment, we retooled, started over and shot the film. And the actress, who I didn't know, was Charlize Theron. The film, of course, as you say, was Monster and it went on to win an Oscar. So for Charlize.

So I guess kind of a happy accident.

But I think that the comedies and the action films and all the commercials in the UK and the theater all were a preparation for what was a very small, very difficult shoot. But I was able to do my best work. Gotcha.

Cody: 00:10:46

Wow, what a story.

Steven Bernstein: 00:10:48

Now, by the way, if I answer at that length to all your short questions, we're gonna be here till next Wednesday.

Cody: 00:10:53

I'll throw at half of em. That's fine. I love this, this is wonderful to hear.

But I was curious though, when you are jumping on something like a comedy project versus a drama, does that impact what your level of preparation is for that project? Or is it more the director or the crew you're working with that shapes Your prep work?

Steven Bernstein: 00:11:13

No, I. I'm. I believe in two things. As a writer, director, I believe absolutely in the discovery of ideas. So when I write screenplays now, I always dictate them.

I always do it without an outline, without a plan, without a structure, without an intention. I write to discover what I think, as Joan Didion said. So that's my process.

And I realized now that that's what I was doing with cinematography as well. I would prepare obsessively.

I would work out every single lens, the focal length, every filter that I was planning to use, every camera movement, every composition, every lighting mix. Whether it's going to be red, light blue, light cobalt blue, you know, light red, orange, cto, ctb.

I would mix all these colors, all based on the idea of what the director and I were trying to achieve viscerally, emotionally, for an audience in a scene. And I could do that with color. If I use bluer colors, it's colder, more intellectual, warmer colors, more passionate. So on.

A slow push in emphasizes a moment or an idea. A filter, particularly diffusion filter, can make someone seem more romantic and pleasing.

Hard side lighting can make a person seem unattractive and dangerous. A shooting someone from below could, because I'm powerful with a long lens from above can make them seem vulnerable.

All those things I would lay out in a diagram and work out every single second of the movie. It would take weeks upon weeks. And then once Celia was on set, I pretty much abandoned all of that and fall into the intuition of the moment.

But the only reason I could be in the intuition was I was so over prepared that I felt safe taking risks. And that's the secret of all filmmaking. That one sentence is, be safe taking risks and make other people feel safe taking risks.

When I direct actors, they know they can do anything and I will only support them. I might disagree, we might go another direction, but there's never a criticism.

The set has to be nurturing and it has to be safe for people to take huge risks and make the best possible films. We took huge risks on Monster, and that's why it's the best possible film.

Cody: 00:13:16

So with. With something like a comedy, obviously there's all the prep that goes into it.

I mean, for a joke to work, it feels like technically it needs to be very perfect a lot of times. How do you feel you control that as a cinematographer versus maybe like a director?

Steven Bernstein: 00:13:30

Oh, great question. And a lot of people don't realize this. Strange things happen to audiences depending what the camera's doing in a comedy. Comedy is comedy.

And horror are the two areas that are most delicate. And if you work on either one of them, you learn the most about filmmaking because it has to do with more than just the dialogue.

You can't just sell a joke with dialogue. Larry David does a lot of the times. But there's other factors that come into it.

For example, comedy almost always plays better in a two shot than a single. Almost always? Why? Because audiences need cues. They're not always sure what is a joke and what isn't, what's funny and what isn't.

But what tells them what is funny and what isn't is the reaction of the person hearing the joke. So if you have action and reaction the same frame, you're 50% of the way to making shooting a better comedy sequence.

So you put two people in the frame whenever possible. Hard, visceral, aggressive type lighting, like high contrast lighting, blue backlight, side light, et cetera. Very good for drama.

You would think that if a joke's funny, it's going to be funny. What other type of lighting? Nope, if you light with high contrast, you kill a lot of jokes very, very often.

Bob Simons, used to be the vice president of Universal and worked in a lot of movies, used to say that shadows are the enemy of comedy, which is a little bit extreme, but. And the Coen brothers have proved them kind of wrong.

But generally, it's not a bad rule that if you shoot too contrasty, you've got to probably subvert the comedy. Camera movement, another thing. For action sequences, great.

But when you try to sell comedy and you're doing a handheld camera and it's moving around a lot. Handheld is associated with news, news associated with negative connotative experiences. And therefore handheld generally subverts comedy.

So all those things come into it. Doesn't mean there's a single way to light comedy.

But generally, if you want a scene to work, you follow those precepts and you think, how can I make this joke land? How can I make these people the most appealing and the charming? And this is the way that we tend to do it.

So, yeah, comedy tends to be what we call a high key lighting drop. It tends to be low key lighting. We tend to use less camera movement. We tend to use multiple people in compositions. All these things serve the comedy.

The trick in all this is not there's a panacea, there's a single answer to all this, but it's a thought process. If you're a great cinematographer, whatever project you're working on, you've got to think about every single frame.

And how are you using all the things that are accorded to you, all the things that are available to you, lighting, camera, movement, composition, filters, all the things that I mentioned, the di, how you time it afterwards. And everything has to be in the service of your aim.

And if it's a comedy, make people laugh, but also make people care empathically about the characters in the film. And a cinematographer does all that. So a great cinematographer makes a comedy better.

Cody: 00:16:10

I've been so curious about that, because you tend to think, at least I tend to think that the editing is what really makes the comedy in the final draft. But all brilliant points. I never really would have thought about so much on my own to that end.

Cody: 00:16:23

What were the challenges you had when you're trying to recreate the Exorcist in Scary Movie two, when you're trying to, you know, achieve the look maybe of that film while also making it funny?

Steven Bernstein: 00:16:33

Well, that was the great joy of it, was because that joke, as it were, was in our ability to replicate the original film. And we knew that the closer we got to the original photography, the funnier it would be.

So I am proud to say that if you put the two next to each other, and a lot of people who aren't on drugs are going to do this, but if you put...

Cody: 00:16:56

Dark Side of the Moon, experiment with Pink Floyd.

Steven Bernstein: 00:16:59

Exact. The Scary Movie and that sequence next to the original film, you'll find it. It's got the same color balance, same contrast, the same focal lengths.

I think I even tried to track down the same lenses. I don't think we got them in the end, but we got very similar lenses. I know in the.

The di, I put the original film up next to it, so I balanced it so it is essentially identical. Except, of course, that things the girl is saying, which is Natasha Leone, if those people don't recognize her, is now a big TV star.

Cody: 00:17:24

Really?

Steven Bernstein: 00:17:25

Yeah.

Cody: 00:17:28

I've seen that movie dozens of times, but I've never apparently read through the credits carefully enough.

Steven Bernstein: 00:17:32

It's Natasha who was just like. Was wishful. Why am I doing this shit? She kept saying, but in a good way. She was very, very funny.

And then James Wood, who was probably whispering the same thing, but. But it wasn't shit. It was hilariously funny and brilliant, directed by Kenan and a success. But, man, we matched it exactly.

And then James Wood was doing exactly what the priest was doing, but we were doing that with all the great comedy the Wayans wrote. So in that case, I was defying the rules of comedy because it was. The joke was how closely we could imitate the original.

Cody: 00:18:02

Got it. So has it been a challenge for you now that we've moved away from actual film stock onto digital cameras?

When you're trying to do, let's say, that scene, would it be tough for you to really imitate what came before since, you know, 70s film stock and all of that?

Steven Bernstein: 00:18:16

Yeah, well, we shot that. We shot that on film. But, yeah, it's. Well, look, digital has a lot of opportunities. You can do so much with it.

There's so many variables that we control with digital, which we really couldn't control with film. We'd have to have a better command of photosensitivity and understand how the emulsions worked. And then it was a skill.

It's a great time for DPs because we were the magicians on set. And until the dailies came back the next day, no one would know if they got anything and only the cinematographer would achieve it.

And that's why they worshiped us, because it seemed that we were conjuring rather than, you know, exercising a skill set. Now with digital, everyone gets to see you as you work. Everyone gets to have input in the post production. We're doing the digital intermediate.

And everyone thinks, of course, they know best, which is never a good thing. A lot of people don't realize that DPs don't get paid for the post production, even though post production is half our job.

We just got to show up and volunteer to what we call color time, which is changing the balance of the frame to make it brighter, darker, greener, bluer. Yeah. More yellow, more contrary, less contrast. Painting out things that we don't like.

We just volunteer to do that to protect the quality of our work. It's a very strange system that we have in the film industry. That said, digital offers us a lot of flexibility that film doesn't.

It's still not as beautiful. No matter what anyone says, not even the great Roger Deakins. It's still not as beautiful, but it's so much more convenient.

And for me, as a director, because I love improvisation, it would be impossible for me to do what I typically do, which is shooting four or five camera same simultaneously, shoot one or two takes with it as scripted, and then do seven or eight takes, partially or entirely improvised, that we would go through so much film stock we would bankrupt any studio that we were.

Cody: 00:19:53

I can only imagine. Yeah. With four cameras rolling.

Steven Bernstein: 00:19:56

Yeah. Or six or seven.

I do car Stuff I do three cameras to the front window, two cameras the side window, a camera inside, and then we'll do the dialogue and then do improvisation for age 10 versions as well. That's a lot of material. And so it swings, roundabouts, it's exchanges. You get a lot more material, but it's not on film.

But you get a lot more material and you have more material. It gives the editor more material to go through and find little gems.

And when I did Jericho, a new movie, which I will get into later, we re edited the entire movie 3, 4, 5 times until it was right. Because we had so much material, we could do that. Yeah.

Jamie: 00:20:33

Going back to the spirit of improvisation, you've always liked to take in your cinematography.

One of my favorite jokes in cinema history is how magical bottle of water that's always cold, blessed by an Alaskan medicine man from the Water Boy is filmed. Because it is so incongruous with everything else in that movie. It's like an artifact from a completely different film. And it's even shot that way.

I'm just curious, on set, how often do you find yourself filming that kind of material, making the decision of, okay, should I film this like everything else, or should I film this in a style that's clashing for comedic effect? Like, how often do you find yourself switching between those modes like that?

Steven Bernstein: 00:21:21

It's an important question because it goes to the nature of creative process. And I think, referencing what I was saying before about the way I write.

What we don't realize, because we don't cognify it fully, is our greater self, very often is in our intuitive self, that when we think too much, we try to rationalize and explain ideas that we can only feel and can't fully understand, if that makes any sense.

So very often when we're on set, we have an impulse about the way we might, like something might act, way we might act as an actor, we might direct, make a creative choice. And it may not connect with anything else, but we just feel that it's right.

So we'll do a few takes where we experiment with it, and then a few takes with a more conservative approach. The inclination from everyone around you is always to be conservative. There's so much money involved. No one wants to take risks.

And if you don't take risks again, I believe that you fail. So we tend to over plan because planning would suggest that we're mitigating risk.

But rarely do we discover the greatness within us in planning that we do in being in the intuitive moment when we're on set now. That water bottle we did plan for, but then I altered it and altered it and altered it until we thought it looked cool.

We knew as we shot it it wouldn't match, but we didn't care. Because in a comedy, which is really very liberating, you can do anything you want if the jokes, if the joke works.

Now, there's still a fine line, because if you go too, too far in any direction, then it becomes farce rather than comedy. And whereas farce can still make you laugh, it never has the same resonance that comedy does, because it's not based in real life experience.

So say what you will about Waterboy, the relationship between Bobby Boucher and his mother is genuine. And you believe the character, as eccentric as he is, exists. And that's why there's real pathos in the film.

And because this pathos, there's also real confidence.

So again, you've got to, as an artist, as a filmmaker, cinematographer, as a director, actor, free yourself from the confines of fear and of planning. And sometimes trust, very often trust your intuitions and make radical choices. I'll tell you one quick anecdote. Music videos.

When I was there in the early days, music videos, the dram days, and the rhythmics and the tears for fears days. And when music videos first started in the uk, we would have huge budgets compared to what they are now. But very often we still shoot them in a day.

And before lunch, you would take your time, every shot as planned, Very careful movements of cameras, beautiful close ups, highlights for the artist, backlights under lights. And then suddenly you'd be after lunch and you'd be out of time. You have another 60 or 70 setups to do.

What invariably would happen is you throw the camera on your shoulder, you throw lights on moving stands, the whole crew would be moving together, all yelling at each other. And you would do those 50 shots in no time at all. When you got to the editing room, guess which was better. The afternoon.

Every single time, the stuff you got in the afternoon was magic because you were entirely in the moment, entirely intuitive and feeling it rather than thinking it. Now, I can't say that's always the case, but for me it is very often the case.

I'll tell you when I stopped writing, according to the official three acts I was supposed to write at, and when I stopped writing with an outline, my writing improved a hundredfold.

Cody: 00:24:36

Oh, I can only imagine. I. In college I did creative writing and it was amazing when you'd have freshmen come in to review papers with you and they were so rigid and stock.

They'd just be terrible. And then by the time you got to the seniors, who knew, okay, I kind of know the rules. I don't have to do that. It was always better.

Steven Bernstein: 00:24:53

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mike: 00:24:54

From a writing standpoint, how does your use of visual language inform the way you write?

Steven Bernstein: 00:25:01

Do you mean, like, as a cinematographer? My visual understanding informed how I write. Is that.

Mike: 00:25:05

Yeah, like how. Like, how does that sort of translate then onto the page?

Steven Bernstein: 00:25:10

Really important that I think that I'm a better writer having been a cinematographer, because I don't think a film is a story. Everyone says film is storytelling, and I think that's misguided.

And I think we think ourselves as storytellers, we're going to subvert ourselves as artists in filmmakers. I think film is an experience. And by experience I mean let's look at other art forms.

Like when you go to an art gallery and you see a Rothko painting, no one in their wildest imagination could, unless they're trying really hard to fit into, you know, an existing orthodoxy, see a Rothko painting or Abstract Expressionism as a story. They can try to impose a story, say, oh, I see a horse, and you know, the artist was depressed at that time. That's all nonsense. The imposing.

When you are looking at abstract expressions, you're experiencing something physically, emotionally, intellectually, but it's not a story. When you hear music, again, you're not hearing a story. You can try to impose a story, oh, it's a faun lost in the woods, but that's a contrivance.

Music, for some reason, particularly music in a monarchy, makes you feel something.

When you see a beautiful photographic composition or a painting of a landscape, say the German expressionist Karl Casper Federich, you look at this vast field and you've got a character in silhouette looking at this orange sunset. You feel something, but there's no particular story associated.

Once you realize that part of the experience of film is just feeling without narrative, then you realize you're not always obliged to write narrative. Sometimes you simply write to create feelings. So some of the most effective moments in film are when characters don't speak at all.

When you have a character silently looking at his beloved and doesn't speak, it's always more effective than having him write some long poetical discourse. It is reductionist to write too much, because the more you say, the less you mean. You know, Ezra pound wrote to T.S.

eliot beginning in 20th century about the nature of writing and also influenced Hemingway. And he said that, look, look at Haiku. The less you say in a poem, the more meaning you have.

And that informed all of the canon of 20th century literature. And I think it's true of film as well. The less we say, very often the more we mean.

So I will now write in such a way and get to a point and I'm quite happy to have a character do nothing and say nothing. So there could be a sense of enigmatic sensation within the audience where we don't know what the character's feeling and thinking.

And that's the nature of our experience of the world. Very often we don't know what others are thinking. We're feeling, we want to, we're pattern seeking creatures.

And that makes the audience lean in and try to figure it out by observing the image. If we can incorporate that into our writing, we become better writers.

Cody: 00:27:52

I think that might have been the most efficient way I've ever heard any of David Lynch's movies described. Like that just sums it all up right there.

Steven Bernstein: 00:28:00

That's fair. I think David lynch is very much of that school and I think film like Days of Heaven I think is also very much of that school.

Cody: 00:28:10

Malik's really.

Steven Bernstein: 00:28:11

Yeah, I think Malik is very much into these things. And Malick is about the enigmatic nature of nature.

So that, you know, in the middle of Thin Red Line, he'll cut to some birds in a hedge and hold on that for an order amount of time. What is scripted there, what is said, how is it advancing narrative? What is it revealing about character? Absolutely nothing.

But as we look at it, we ruminate on the indifference of nature to the misfortune of man. And that is profound and done with a shot, not with a line of dialogue.

Cody: 00:28:41

I wish I'd heard all of this before I watched A Hidden Life last week. It would have made the experience so much better.

Steven Bernstein: 00:28:48

I'm available for weddings.

Cody: 00:28:52

But to that end, you know, we just discussed how you feel about as you're writing characters. You've had several projects where you are in charge of the writing, the producing, the directing.

Your most recent project, it looks like another one of those setups where you're in control of a lot of these facets. Do you kind of relish that because it allows you to fully shape the story?

Or is it one of those things like, if I don't do it, no one else will do it correctly?

Steven Bernstein: 00:29:14

I don't know. I lecture about leadership.

I think the most important thing a director is to lead others, which means facilitate others, to get them to be the best version of themselves. To contribute to your vision. So I never feel that I've got to do it by myself. Because if I try to do it myself, I. I would fail. And I fail a lot.

But I don't feel in that way anymore. I'm inclined to delegate. I'm inclined to trust others. I'll pin in the broad strokes and say what my vision is.

But again, I'll say to my collaborators, hey, you're safe, taking risks. You understand what my broad vision is. But what do you think it should be? What do you think about these ideas that we're examining?

What do you think about this scene? How can we make it more comic, more dramatic, more significant? And I want them to contribute.

So I think in that sense, I step back from this titular leadership or this being a martinet and ordering other people around. I like to think of myself as nurturing. The first thing I reveals my vulnerabilities.

First day of every film, I say, I don't fully know exactly what I'm doing on this film. There's some things I'm frightened of, some things that might fail or might not succeed. I need your help.

And when you ask for help, people step up and give it to you. Learn how to apologize. I know not only to apologize for what I've done, but to acknowledge how it happened and how I might change in the future.

If people know that they're protected from either my caprice or failures, that I will admit fault when I do it, then again, they're more inclined to contribute. So my job is not to take control of everything, but to facilitate others so they can make my film better.

It's difficult, though, because independently minded, I like independent films.

When you raise the money and when you're responsible to the investors, when you've written it, when you're directing it last, but I was also acting in it. It is a lot. And you've got to remind yourself to step back and get the opinion of others.

Otherwise you can get lost in your own narcissism, which a lot of people do in this industry, for sure.

Cody: 00:31:01

So, not a fan of the auteur theory, I'm guessing?

Steven Bernstein: 00:31:04

Well, I am and I'm not. I mean, I do believe that we understand films better by recognizing a single author of a film.

So I think we can look at Rivet or Chabrau or Truffaut or Godard or Coppola and see that, yeah, they have a singular vision. But I think all of those people will be the first to admit that.

Raoul Coutard, for example, the cinematographer La Nouvel Vogue made a huge contribution. Coppola is more than generous in recognizing his composer. And a cinematographer is.

Just because you provide the principal vision and have others contribute doesn't mean that you're not significant. But I think directing would be better understood as a management position.

Position where you're galvanizing the efforts of others and then leading them in a particular direction, but still getting them to contribute.

Your ability to get them to contribute is what makes you an auteur, because you're guiding them in a way that they're the best versions of themselves. And good leaders make good directors and make good films.

Cody: 00:32:04

Got it.

So to just touch back briefly here, we mentioned that you're working on a new project that you'll be writing and producing and directing grq, that's also a novel. Which, which version of that story came first to you?

Was it planned as a novel and you figured this would also be a very good film, or did you think of it as a film and you thought I could also create this as a novel?

Steven Bernstein: 00:32:23

Well, it's interesting. First I was just writing it and I was experimenting with the idea of freeing myself more as a writer.

I had already worked on getting rid of the computer. I had gotten.

I had decided that everything that Robin McKee and Save the Cat and Kill the Dog and all the rest of the books was pernicious and evil and not. I went, not evil and ill intended, but just it. It destroys writing.

Cody: 00:32:46

Restrictive.

Steven Bernstein: 00:32:47

Well, restrictive by. They did a survey recently, a test, where they showed audiences the first 10 minutes of a movie.

And they said, these audiences, after stopping the film, how does the film end? 90% of the audience predicted how the film would end after watching 10 minutes.

Now, to my mind, if you're engaged in a form of art and your audience knows where it's going to go within 10 minutes, there's something inherently wrong. Also, 90% of all films fail, either financially or creatively.

So 90% of films are failing and more than 90% of films use the same three act structure.

If you're doing a scientific experiment that fails 90% of the time, you start to wonder, maybe there's something wrong with the elements in your experiment, maybe it's time to change those elements. That's what I've come to believe. So to this I wanted to get rid of the accoutrements and the obstacles of traditional writing.

And I said, well, what if I stop writing screenplays? What if I just write this as a, as a narrative? So I wrote the novel in a day and a half of having characters just talk at great length.

And the interesting thing was that I examined the manuscript and I discovered the nature of these characters so I could then go back and do a rewrite and then another rewrite, and then another, another rewrite, another rewrite until my 15th or 20th rewrite of the novel. I said, seems kind of interesting. I'll send it to a literary agent I know they'll probably tell me it's a bunch of crap and I can give up my.

And they wrote back immediately saying, and this is them, not me, so I'm not lacking humility. They said, this is brilliant. I think we get this published. And I go, yeah, you mean self publishing. No, no, no, we can get to a publisher.

I said, all right, well, humiliate me, go ahead. And I sent to a publisher, said, within weeks, publishers said, we want to publish this book. So they published it.

And the reviews on Amazon have been, I think, at 95% of 5. So Goodreads. Same thing. Waterstones in the UK, same thing. Barnes and Noble, Same thing.

The most successful writing I've ever done in my life, done in the most radical way.

And I realized that I stumbled upon kind of the magic formula for creative process, which is eliminate obstacles, focus on character, and write to discover what you think. And then after you read what you wrote, then you go back and apply structure.

Don't start with structure or story, because then you'll stop yourself from discovering the thing that's great within you that you can't access through ordinary channels.

I know it sounds all Harry Fairy and Californian spiritual, but I think there's some other cognitive processes occurring of that that I strongly recommend to all writers, creative directors, actors, actors in particular. Same thing. That may be a, that sounds a.

Cody: 00:35:21

Little bit in the ballpark of how Stephen King approaches writing where he, he doesn't set out with a form or necessarily an ending and makes it happen.

Steven Bernstein: 00:35:28

As he goes, exactly as he writes. It's, it's almost identical. And John Barth wrote the same way. And I understand Solinger sometimes wrote that way.

So it's not like I, I, I invented it, but it's, it's like people are, are discovering it, but screenwriters never employ it. And, and after I wrote the book, the screenplay was so much easier to write because I knew who the characters were.

And the screenplay again, I wrote in like three days and then re edited within a month. And then we raised the money to make the film like a month after that. So very, very quick for Film.

Usually films take seven years to develop, but we had this mounted and shot within six months of my writing screenplay. And then we had the edit finished five months after that, and the film's done and coming out next year. So, like that.

Cody: 00:36:11

That is incredible. All the filmmakers we've talked to, you just get a sense that any movie that hits the screen is a miracle.

So to have one that can be put together in that amount of time with that much enthusiasm and force is mind blowing.

Steven Bernstein: 00:36:25

No question it is. And they should give awards just for filming. It's a very painful process going to festivals. Sundance would have 7,000 films sent to it this year.

That means. And they only take, like 100.

That means there's over 6,000 people who are disappointed, who sweated blood, who borrowed money, who lived in fear and did the best work they could, only to have people not see their movie. And, you know, I don't want to get too flaky, but I think filmmaking is like all art is kind of sacred in that it reframes the world.

It's very hard to understand the world. I think the world is chaotic, and I think we try to find any forms that we can. That's why everyone loves the.

All the books about screenwriting, because they'd rather have a form than a right. They'd rather have a religion, whatever the religion is.

And by the way, there's a lot of different religions in the world, and I can pretty much presume that they're not all right because they. They're. They're contradictory of each other. That means the mass majority of people at any one time are. Are worshiping the wrong God.

Now, that's either because they're misguided or this is a primal impulse to see the world as ordered. Whatever God you choose to believe in. I'm not saying that there isn't a God or any sacrilegious get me after the ice or trouble.

I'm just saying that there's a lot of religions in the world that your individual religion, I think you'll discover, disagrees with. Why is that an impulse for religion? Why is there an impulse for art? Why do we enjoy art? Because it orders our chaotic experience of the world.

And that is, I think, significant and important.

So what we're doing in making these films, even when they fail, is something that has a great nobility because we're trying to provide explanation of behaviors to our fellow sufferers.

Cody: 00:37:57

Boy, it's tough to follow up a statement like that because it's the monster. To Corky Romano Problem. I feel silly now saying something though that's like beautiful statement.

Mike: 00:38:08

My feeling has always been and why in a lot of like mental health circles and stuff, I always talk about art and quote unquote media and stuff like that. And sometimes people are a little confused at first until I start going into it more.

Is the thing that truly separates us as a intelligence esque species is the ability to create art. And also read art more or less like that is. That is the primary language of what a human being is and how it can it expresses itself.

And that's where I think it's interesting that you can then see art in everything. You know, there is no such thing as anti art or something that is not artful in some way.

Even what is seen as maybe like the dumbest piece of schlock out there has some sort of meaning if it plays to somebody or even just the fact it exists sometimes is enough to say something.

Steven Bernstein: 00:39:06

And when you say dumbest schlock, I know you're referring to one of my movies. I just don't know which one. But I can, I can show Mike.

Cody: 00:39:14

How dare you.

Steven Bernstein: 00:39:15

I can guess, but I'm not sure which one you mean. But. But I think you're.

Cody: 00:39:19

We find out Mike just hates Happy Gilmore for some reason. He just doesn't appreciate golf.

Steven Bernstein: 00:39:24

But I think you're. I think, I think you're spot on. I think that's exactly what the it's all about. I think everybody is trying to order the world.

You know, again, people I mentor as writers and I say, tell me about your screenplay now. Tell me the story and I'll go on for like 45 minutes. I'll say tell me about the characters.

They can't speak three sets about the character characters. They don't know who the character is. And yet our experience, the world is. We go and we meet people. Look, Jamie, Mike, Cody, we all just met.

We're probably listening to each other, trying to figure each other out. Still when we go to a shop or when we go for a job interview or we have a sports team that we follow, we read about the profiles of those players.

We're always trying to figure people out. And I find sport fascinating. Who we identify with and who we don't. We know the profiles of all our players of our favorite teams.

It doesn't mean that they're better or nicer than anybody else, but we want them to be because we want to root for a person that we have an empathic connection with. And we're trying to order the world.

There's a famous philosophic experiment, I'm sure you guys know, where there's this kind of strange drawing that could be either a. A duck or a. Or a rabbit. And you say to a person, look at this and what is it?

And sometimes they'll see the duck, and sometimes they'll see the rabbit. The object itself hasn't changed, and you haven't changed. You just see different things at different times. That's how curious the world is.

When we realize there's no object, reality, then we realize the world is a capricious and difficult thing to inhabit and we have to impose form on it. But to not impose any form is to live in madness. So we'll take an arbitrary form, even if we sense intuitively it's not right over the lack of form.

And that's what art does and is so significant to us because we want there to be order. The most tragic thing is when we're at death's door.

If you've been around people who are dying, for me, the great tragedy of the death, besides the sense of impending loss of someone they love, is the confusion in their eyes.

That you would hope that there would be the intervention of the divine and all would be manifest and revealed and all that passed before in your life would be clear and understood. What I saw there instead in each dying person was confusion. So that's why I think art is kind of sacred, which is.

It tries to alleviate, obviate that confusion. It tries to suggest that there's order in all this. And that's a noble thing. How we transition from Corky Romano to this guy, I do not fucking know.

But I think to go back to the recording, yeah, good luck on making this a smooth transition.

And not to tout, but, you know, grq, the book and the film that we're talking about is obviously about these very things, about someone who creates a wholly disordered world, who lies to his wife, is about to have his house repossessed and invest everything he's got in cryptocurrency to try to make money in like seven or eight hours to save himself. And he's relying on this crazy filmmaker who's making a film called grq. And that filmmaker's name is Steve Bernstein.

And he's about to announce a film about a guy who gets into all sorts of trouble investing in cryptocurrency. So it's a meta within a meta within a meta within a meta.

But the reason I was so fascinated and study Crypto at such length is this goes to everything that we four are talking about, which is this sense of a false imposition of order on a chaotic world.

Because despite all my friends in the crypto world, the blockchain world, who will probably not forgive me for saying this when they hear this, there is no logic or order or reason or methodology in blockchain and crypto. None. The reason it goes up or down is entirely arbitrary.

Just like whether you're going to be successful or successful in life or happy or unhappy is at least partially arbitrary. It's just an accident of existence. And so people are pouring their fortunes into crypto investment, and they have.

And the people who take the money from them and the people who own the coins have no idea where it's going to go. It's just arbitrary. And yet we do it anyway.

Because again, in another fantastic survey of the people who invest in crypto, when asked whether they thought their investment would go up or down, about 85% said they thought it would go up. Power, belief, power, belief. And that's what we rely on, is the great delusion is belief. Right? So we got to.

But we got to keep deluding ourselves, otherwise we'll go mad. So that's why I, when I investigate, I say, this is so much up my street. It's about everything that I believe in.

I'll write a book about this, and I'll write about a book about a character, like you said, who believes, despite evidence to the contrary, that everything will be okay and invest everything. And then Ellie's finally caught up with an earthquake's going on and he's still lying to his wife. And it's emblematic of all of our experiences.

Cody: 00:43:59

Well, I'm getting some uncut gem flashbacks here.

Steven Bernstein: 00:44:02

Oh, very, very related. What a great film that was.

Cody: 00:44:05

Oh, absolutely. We can go back to Adam Sandler, man, who thought he had every ounce of that performance in him. Just amazing stuff.

Steven Bernstein: 00:44:12

Well, again, a great empath and great man. And, you know, Adam is an actor, so all the, all the Bobby Boucher and all the rest of it are contrivances.

The real Adam is a substantive, grounded, decent person who still has the same friends from college. I mean, how many still have friends from college? Close relationships?

Cody: 00:44:32

Not many of them.

Steven Bernstein: 00:44:33

Nope. And looked after everybody around him. Just a super decent, kind human.

Cody: 00:44:38

So to jump back to grq, I wanted to ask, though, because you spent so much time talking about form and trying to give things form, what are the challenges for taking a story like GRQ in novel form and Adapting it yourself and getting it onto film.

Steven Bernstein: 00:44:51

Another great question.

Cody: 00:44:52

Is it a character thing that's more important in this case? As long as the characters shine through, the story will follow.

Steven Bernstein: 00:44:57

Yeah, I think everything's about character. Ultimately. I think story serves character. Story doesn't matter. You can tell a good story in a film could suck.

Very often, lots of good story films suck. What audiences actually care about is character.

Now, we use story as a conduit to discovery of character, but if there isn't that first engagement with audience and character, they don't care where the story's going because they don't care about the character.

When you create a complex character and their motivation and their interior world and their backstory isn't clear, say, from like Happy Go Lucky with Sally Hawkins, you can't stop watching that film because you know the character or you hope the character is gradually going to be revealed through exposition or through narrative. My friend Jon Favreau did the first really good Marvel film in Iron man, and that scene in the Humvee was improvised with Robert Downey.

And if that scene didn't exist, I'm not sure the Marvel franchise would exist. And yet is that action? Nope. Is Iron man in that scene? Nope. Are the evil being smitten by the good and virtuous? Nope.

It's just a very neurotic, very needy, fairly obnoxious individual going on a long, awkward discourse. But because of that, we feel an empathic connection with this very confusing, enigmatic character, and we want to know who that character is.

So when you look at that movie, the next scene, when he's in the cave and he's fitting himself in his chest, and later in the film, we know he's capable of good or bad, selfishness and generosity, large jest, largess and pettiness, all those things rolled into a character. So we go on the journey trying to discover the real nature of the character. That's good writing, and that's what filmmaking is really about.

Character, not story. Story serves character. But without the interest in character, you have story of interest. Wow.

So, to your point, when I was writing GRQ the film, I knew that I knew the characters really well from the novel because the backstory and I could explore those things, I was very aware of what would build empathy and what would subvert it.

So even though he was doing really bad things, like borrowing money from his mother, all the money she had to invest in cryptocurrency, not a good thing to do. Same time I made a point of having the camera on the actor by himself in moments where he was feeling frightened and guilty.

Didn't have him say anything, just had the camera settle. Lesson I learned cinematography. Slow push in of a character looking frightened and needy.

And that's all I had to do to make the audience care about that character and then care about the outcome of the bad decisions that he made. I couldn't do that in the novel, but I could very much do that in the film.

So I would use different mechanisms and different techniques that work in movies better than the book. But had I not written the book, I wouldn't understand the backstory of the character and why he had done what he did.

So there are two companion pieces. If you want real insight into self delusion, read the book.

If you want the wild, scary experience of investing everything you have in a one off investment, then watch the movie. They're different experiences, two different approaches to the thing.

Cody: 00:48:02

Yeah, and I mean with current box office, it feels like audiences maybe are unconsciously starving for these kind of characters because it feels like people are rejecting a lot of things that are coming out and turning towards these smaller films that do have maybe these richer character works in them.

Steven Bernstein: 00:48:18

Brilliantly observed. I think that's exactly right. I think that's what they always wanted.

I think when the streamers were killing independent films, they were ignoring the fact that audiences didn't want independent cinemas killed. They like going out and they like learning about the nature of the world. And that's what art does. It says, hey, I know you're confused.

Here's my take on the way the world works. And that's important.

And when you see a big Marvel film or a big action film, or some big farceable comedy, particularly when it's farce, you're not learning much about the world because you don't recognize the world you live in in the film that you're observing. So I think for those reasons we will see a resurgence of independent films.

Independent films about real people in real crisis or in real love or in real need or whatever it is. And I think ultimately audiences take more away from that than they do from big action.

I think when you're 14 and you want to have lots of hormonal imbalances, you want to hear a lot of loud noises, but I think as you evolve as a person, you're looking for understanding and insight.

Cody: 00:49:13

Definitely. Man, this has just been such a great use of time. Thank you so much, Stephen, for sticking with us. I can't wait. I've got your book on order here.

I apologize. I didn't have time to actually read it beforehand. I know.

Steven Bernstein: 00:49:24

What a jerk.

Cody: 00:49:25

I say that at the end instead of the start. So you're not, you know, hating my guts the entire time, but I can't read it.

Steven Bernstein: 00:49:31

But Jamie and Mike have read it, haven't. Haven't you?

Cody: 00:49:33

Oh, back and forth. That's why they booked it.

Mike: 00:49:35

Of course. Yeah.

Mike: 00:49:37

To each other.

Steven Bernstein: 00:49:40

Every day I go to Amazon to see how many new book sales. So I'm expecting the least, after my very boring discourse, to see three or maybe two quick sales in the next 30 minutes.

So, Mike and Jamie, I'm watching.

Cody: 00:49:52

I think. I think this speaks more about box office pulp. Your numbers will probably tank after the episode comes out, so I apologize.

Steven Bernstein: 00:49:59

To the contrary, I suspect you guys got a wide. You've been around for 10 years. You've been doing this.

Cody: 00:50:04

Something like that. Whenever Prometheus came out, I think is when we started doing episodes. So it's been a while.

Steven Bernstein: 00:50:08

Do you know how long. How hard it is to keep a podcast going? That long? I guess. You do. Well done.

Cody: 00:50:12

Yeah, well, you would know better than us. You keep at it weekly. So, folks, if you want more of Stephen, he does have his weekly podcast. Definitely check those episodes out.

Full of rich details and musings. The book that just came out in June, didn't it? So pretty much fresh off the presses.

Steven Bernstein: 00:50:28

Fresh off the presses. GRQ came out in June. Yep.

Cody: 00:50:30

Yeah. So folks can get their hands on that right now, wherever you buy your books.

I don't know if there's a best spot for you if Amazon works or if you have some mom and pops.

Steven Bernstein: 00:50:38

You want to recommend Amazon Works or any good bookstore. Or maybe if you guys can do it, put a link up and link people so they can find it. But. Or they can go to my Instagram page.

There's a link there and there's links everywhere. Great.

Cody: 00:50:50

What's your Instagram handle?

Steven Bernstein: 00:50:51

Oh, it's stevenbergstein. Director, writer.

Cody: 00:50:53

You said that's scheduled for: 2026

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:00

Spring of: 2026

Cody: 00:51:01

Wonderful. Very excited to check that out when it hits. Thank you again so much for spending the time with us. This has been fantastic.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:08

Great fun, guys. Thank you so much.

Cody: 00:51:10

Thank you.

Mike: 00:51:10

Thank you.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:10

Cheers. Bye. Bye. Take care, guys.

Cody: 00:51:12

We're going to find out. Mike didn't hit the record button.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:14

Now that would be funny.

Cody: 00:51:16

A lens cap on the camera kind of story.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:18

That would be funny as sh--

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:26

Hello. Did I. Should I have stayed quiet and heard all your secrets or what should I have done?

Cody: 00:51:32

We were. We were on top of things. Only boring stories. Although you did miss a section talking about the history of the beanie cap, so.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:38

Oh, it's. What a coincidence. I was only just thinking about the. No, it wasn't.

Cody: 00:51:44

We thought you'd have like a whole like TED Talk prepared about Beanies for us, but.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:48

Oh, I could throw one together. It would be made up, but I think it'd be fantastic.

Cody: 00:51:54

It was a good combination. I know so little about Beanies. I would trust every word you have to say.

Steven Bernstein: 00:51:58

I. Well, it's probably.

Charles Benistock was probably a Russian Bolshevik who was ostracized because of his obsession with his salvatorial elegance rather than the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. And his followers would wear Bina stocks, which then of course became shortened to Beanies. It's a true story.

Cody: 00:52:24

I'm going to believe that's true because I love it so much. That's head cane for me. Now I'm just going to write that into Wikipedia if it's not there.

Mike: 00:52:31

I've never wanted to write something so bad in my life.

Steven Bernstein: 00:52:35

Yes. You know, it's the thing now with the world as it is.

The affirmation of what we know probably to be true has kind of now been vanquished by sort of flood of information and misinformation. So it's impossible to know what is true and what isn't. I guess.

Cody: 00:52:53

I'm so upset Mike didn't have the mic running because. What a great opening statement.

Steven Bernstein: 00:52:56

Yeah.

Mike: 00:52:59

Hey, I have the backup recorder for going.

Cody: 00:53:03

Well, that's good.

Jamie: 00:53:03

All the various recordings going.

Cody: 00:53:06

Thank you.

Cody: 00:53:07

We can save that for the post credit scene.