A Curious Mind (5 page)

Ron and I are different in many ways—especially our temperaments. But we share a sense of standards, including how to tell a story, and most important, we agree on what makes a great story. In fact, if there's anyone I know who is as genuinely curious as I am, it's Ron Howard. When we're in meetings together, he asks as many questions as I do, and his questions are different, and they elicit different information.

My curiosity conversations are something I've done with consistency and purpose for thirty-five years. You'll see many examples of them throughout this book. These conversations are events or occasions when curiosity itself is the motivation.

But in my everyday work and life, curiosity itself is not an “occasion.” It's the opposite. Curiosity is something I use all the time. I'm always asking questions. For me, it's an instinct. It's also, very distinctly, a technique.

I'm a boss—Ron Howard and I run Imagine together—but I'm not much of an order giver. My management style is to ask questions. If someone's doing something I don't understand, or don't like, if someone who works for me is doing something unexpected, I start out asking questions. Being curious.

I'm constantly meeting new people—sometimes at events, but often the new people are sitting on the couch in my office during the workday. I'm not particularly outgoing, but I have to
act
outgoing all the time. So how do I handle all these new
people—sometimes a dozen in a single day—often sitting eagerly right in front of me, expecting me to run the conversation? I ask questions, of course. I let them do the talking. Being interested in someone isn't that hard if you know even a little about them—and as I've discovered, people love talking about their work, what they know about, their journey.

The entertainment business requires a huge amount of confidence. You have to believe in your own ideas for movies and TV shows, and you quickly discover that the safest answer for any studio or investor or executive to give is “no.” I'm often amazed that we get any movies made at all. But you can't succeed in Hollywood if you're discouraged by being told “no,” because regardless of the actual quality of your ideas, or even the quality of your track record, you'll get told “no” all the time. You have to have the confidence to push forward. That's true in all corners of the world—you have to have confidence if you work at a Silicon Valley tech company or treat patients at an inner-city hospital. My confidence comes from curiosity. Yes, asking questions builds confidence in your own ideas.

Curiosity does something else for me: it helps me cut through the routine anxiety of work and life.

I worry, for instance, about becoming complacent—I worry that out here in Hollywood, I'll end up in a bubble isolated from what's going on in the rest of the world, from how it's changing and evolving. I use curiosity to pop the bubble, to keep complacency at bay.

I also worry about much more ordinary things—I worry about giving speeches; I worry about the safety of my kids; I even worry about the police—police officers make me nervous. I use curiosity when I'm worried about something. If you understand what kind of speech someone wants you to give, if you understand how cops think, you'll either see your fear dissipate, or you'll be able to handle it.

I use curiosity as a management tool.

I use it to help me be outgoing.

I use curiosity to power my self-confidence.

I use it to avoid getting into a rut, and I use it to manage my own worries.

In the coming chapters, I'm going to analyze and tell stories about these different types of curiosity, because I think they can be useful to almost anyone.

And that is the most important way I use curiosity: I use it to tell stories. That, really, is my profession. My job as a producer is to look for good stories to tell, and I need people to write those stories, to act in them, to direct them. I'm looking for the money to get those stories made, and for ideas about how to sell the finished stories to the public. But, for me, the key to all these elements is the story itself.

Here's one of the secrets of life in Hollywood—a secret you learn in ninth-grade English class, but that many people forget. There are only a few kinds of stories in the world: romance, quest, tragedy, comedy. We've been telling stories for 4,000 years. Every story has been told.

And yet here I sit in the middle of a business devoted to either finding new stories, or taking old stories and telling them in fresh ways, with fresh characters.

Good storytelling requires creativity and originality; it requires a real spark of inspiration. Where does the spark come from? I think curiosity is the flint from which flies the spark of inspiration.

In fact, storytelling and curiosity are natural allies. Curiosity is what drives human beings out into the world every day, to ask questions about what's going on around them, about people and why they behave the way they do. Storytelling is the act of bringing home the discoveries learned from curiosity. The story is a report from the front lines of curiosity.

Storytelling gives us the ability to tell everyone else what we've learned—or to tell everyone the story of our adventure, or about the adventures of the people we've met. Likewise, nothing sparks curiosity like good storytelling. Curiosity drives the desire to keep reading the book you can't put down, it's the desire to know how much of a movie you've just seen is true.

Curiosity and storytelling are intertwined. They give each other power.

What makes a story fresh is the point of view of the person telling it.

I produced a movie called
Splash
, about what happens when a man falls in love with a mermaid.

I produced a movie called
Apollo 13
, the true story of what
happens when three U.S. astronauts get trapped in their crippled spaceship.

I produced a movie called
8 Mile
, about trying to be a white rap musician in the black rap world of Detroit.

I produced a movie called
American Gangster
, about a heroin smuggler in Vietnam-era New York.

American Gangster
isn't about a gangster—it's about capability, it's about talent and determination.

8 Mile
isn't about rap music, it isn't even about race—it's about surmounting humiliation, about respect, about being an outsider.

Apollo 13
isn't about aeronautics—it's about resourcefulness, about putting aside panic in the name of survival.

And
Splash
, of course, isn't about mermaids—only a thousand people in Hollywood told me we couldn't make a movie about mermaids.
Splash
is about love, about finding the right love for yourself, as opposed to the love others would choose for you.

I don't want to make movies about alluring mermaids or courageous astronauts, about brazen drug smugglers or struggling musicians. At least, I don't want to make predictable movies about
only
those things.

I don't want to tell stories where the “excitement” comes from explosions or special effects or sex scenes.

I want to tell the very best stories I can, stories that are memorable, that resonate, that make the audience think, that sometimes make people see their own lives differently. And to
find those stories, to get to inspiration, to find that spark of creativity, what I do is ask questions.

What kind of story is it? Is it a comedy? A myth? An adventure?

What's the right tone for this story?

Why are the characters in this story in trouble?

What connects the characters in this story to each other?

What makes this story emotionally satisfying?

Who is telling this story, and what is that person's point of view? What is his challenge? What is her dream?

And most important, what is this story about? The plot is what happens in the story, but that plot is not what the story is
about
.

I don't think I'd be very good at my job if I weren't curious. I think I'd be making movies that weren't very good.

I keep asking questions until something interesting happens. My talent is to know enough to ask the questions, and to know when something interesting happens.

What I think is so exciting about curiosity is that it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what your job is, or what your passion is. Curiosity works the same way for all of us—if we use it well.

You don't have to be Thomas Edison. You don't have to be Steve Jobs. You don't have to be Steven Spielberg. But you can be “creative” and “innovative” and “compelling” and “original”—because you can be curious.

Curiosity doesn't only help you solve problems—no matter
what those problems are. There's a bonus: curiosity is free. You don't need a training course. You don't need special equipment or expensive clothing, you don't need a smartphone or a high-speed Internet connection, you don't need the full set of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
(which I was always a little sad I didn't have).

You're born curious, and no matter how much battering your curiosity has taken, it's standing by, ready to be awakened.

“Curiosity . . . is insubordination in its purest form.”

—Vladimir Nabokov
¹

THE POLICE OFFICERS ASKED ME
to lower my pants. That's when I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

It was April 30, 1992, and I was standing inside Parker Center, the distinctive downtown LA building that was then headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department. I had been
working for months to get to this spot—to meet Daryl Gates, the legendary chief of the LAPD, a man renowned for inventing the modern police SWAT unit, and for showing big-city police departments across the country how to function more like paramilitary units.

In Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s, no one wielded power like Chief Gates. I was fascinated by that power, and by the personality that was able to accumulate it and use it. This type of influence is completely alien to me. I don't see the world as a hierarchy—as a chain of command. I don't want control over hundreds of people, I don't see life, or work, as an opportunity to build up power and exercise it. I don't particularly like giving orders, or seeing whether people have enough respect for me, or fear of me, to obey those orders. But the world is filled with people maneuvering for power—in fact, the typical workplace is filled with people like that, and we probably need them.

As much as I'm fascinated by that kind of power, I'm also wary of it. I do want to understand that kind of personality, as a storyteller and also as a citizen. Chief Gates made a great curiosity conversation—the perfect example of a certain kind of autocratic mind-set, right in my own city.

I tried for many months to get on Gates's calendar—working my way through an assistant, a secretary, one cop, another cop. Finally, in early 1992, his office gave me an appointment to have lunch with Chief Gates—four months into the future.

And then, on April 29, 1992, the day before my lunch, the
four LA police officers who had been caught on videotape beating Rodney King were acquitted of the charges against them, and rioting started across Los Angeles.

I got up that Thursday morning—April 30—and the rioting had gone on all night, with buildings being burned and neighborhoods being looted. Suddenly, it was the most chaotic moment in Los Angeles in thirty years, since the Watts riots in 1965. The Los Angeles Police Department was at the center of the chaos—it was the reason for it, and also responsible for stopping it. Chief Gates completely embodied the militaristic approach that led to the Rodney King beating in the first place.

I thought for sure Gates would have enough to handle that morning and that our lunch would certainly be canceled. But no—lunch was a go.

When I got to Parker Center, it was locked down. There were concrete barriers out front, and a line of police officers, and a series of checkpoints to get into the building. They asked, “Who are you going to see?” And I answered, “Chief Daryl Gates.”

I produced my ID. In the lobby there was another line of cops. A couple of them patted me down. They asked me to lower my pants. Being searched to my underwear by two uniformed LAPD officers did nothing to reduce my wariness of the police, but I wanted to see Daryl Gates; I'd been trying to see him for more than a year. With my pants pulled back up, I was escorted onto the elevator by a pair of officers who rode up to the sixth floor with me.

Parker Center vibrated with energy. Although the building
was populated by the people we rely on to be cool in a crisis, it felt like everyone was a little freaked out.

I arrived at Chief Gates's suite—an outer room and his office. Everyone around me was in uniform, including the chief. He was sitting at an ordinary, utilitarian conference table in his office, surrounded by wooden chairs resembling schoolroom chairs, with arms. He was seated on one side, and I took a seat at the end.

Chief Gates seemed totally relaxed. Downstairs, the city was burning, exploding. That very afternoon, the mayor would impose a state of emergency and a curfew and call out the National Guard; the next night, President George H. W. Bush would give a televised, prime-time speech to the nation about the LA riots.
²

But Daryl Gates was calm.

He greeted me. “What would you like for lunch?” he asked. I was so nervous, I didn't quite know what to say. “What are you having, sir?” I asked.

“I'm having a tuna sandwich,” Gates said.

“I'll have what you're having.” A few minutes later, an aide delivered two tuna sandwiches with potato chips on the side.