“I had failed continuously for ten years”

Nine Oscar nominations on one stage. What followed was less a panel than a conversation four people were having in front of an audience — about why they started, what it costs, and whether any of them would recommend it.

Edited for length and clarity.

When did you know?

Michael Arndt: When I was fifteen my dad took the whole family to see Apocalypse Now. A real family moment. But the first six minutes of that film — the triple dissolves, the Doors playing — I’d grown up on multiplex stuff in the suburbs, and it was the first time I saw a film and thought: cinema is art. It can do something more than tell a story. It can be this beautiful, lyrical thing.

I fell completely in love with movies. But it always seemed like they got made somewhere else, by other people. A very faraway thing.

Then I came to New York, where I had an aunt — a sort of hippie artist. She said, oh, if you go up to Washington Square Park, that’s where the film students are.

Film students? Yeah, from the film school.

Film school?

And from that moment, that was it.

Lee Daniels: Two experiences.

I was seven. I’m from Philadelphia, and it was my first time in the theatre section of the public library — I don’t know, the universe, God, somebody walked me over there. And I saw a black-and-white photograph of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton on the cover of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I was so fascinated by that cover that it became the first book I ever read cover to cover. And I understood the dynamic. I took it home, and out on my stoop in the projects I had everybody reading Martha and George.

The second was at sixteen. I saw Pink Flamingos in downtown Philly and I was so mad. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. So I took my seventy-year-old aunt back to see it with me, because I couldn’t believe it.

At the end of the movie, in front of all those white people, she slapped me. She said, what the f*ck did you take me to see?

And I thought: I want to make people feel the way she just felt. Because she felt something.

Celine Song: The first thing I ever wrote was a poem, when I was four or five. It was for school, and it was about how a spider eating a butterfly is very sad, but the spider has to eat.

That was the whole poem. And I remember feeling like there’s something here I might commit my whole life to.

With movies I had a pretty normal high-school film-fan experience — The Matrix, Fight Club, Donnie Darko, all the Lord of the Rings, all the Star Wars. I did all the things.

But the moment I felt maybe this is something I do was at a university production of Brecht’s Drums in the Night. I was studying psychology, planning to be a psychologist, minoring in philosophy. I watched that play and thought: oh. I think maybe I should do this.

Tony Kushner: I don’t know that there was a moment. I grew up in a family of musicians — my sister’s a painter, my brother’s a musician. It was the family business. As long as we made a living at it, there was no parental opposition.

I always sort of wanted to be a writer. But there were distinct moments when I had to acknowledge it and entertain the possibility that I could do it — even though I always felt it was unlikely I’d do it well enough to make a living, or well enough to please my father.

I came from Louisiana to Columbia, back when Columbia was still a place to be proud of. I was seeing an enormous number of plays. And right around then, Richard Foreman did his famous production of The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center, produced by Joe Papp, with Raúl Juliá.

I saw it nine times. Standing room. I just kept going back.

It made me desperate to do that. So I said to myself: if I can write down twelve ideas for plays in the space of an hour, I’ll start to allow the possibility that I could be a playwright.

I did it. Twelve ideas. All of them terrible except one, which I eventually used.

But I wrote them down. And I thought, okay — maybe I can be a playwright.

I’m still not sure I made the right decision.

Is there a through-line that is you?

Tony Kushner: I hate talking to groups of writers, because it’s all so idiosyncratic. But I wouldn’t ever want to lead with that as an ambition.

Part of what you do when you dramatise something is try to unhinge the reasonably solid construction of your social self — your ego — so that other things inside you can begin to assume independent lives and make their way onto the page.

It’s a struggle to dissolve your own sense of self. Sometimes I’m happiest when I think: oh, I’ve just written something that’s absolutely nothing like me. I wouldn’t even have thought of that — although obviously I did think of it. But it feels like somebody other than me is on the stage.

I spent five hours yesterday at the New York Film Festival watching Rebecca Miller’s documentary about Scorsese, and there’s a revelation of who this man is across the work. But there’s also a tremendous amount of accident. He did Mean Streets, then was floating around unsure what to do next, and Ellen Burstyn said: I want to make a movie about a waitress. So the next film is Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which makes no sense at all. And then Taxi Driver.

Most of my work in film has been as Steven Spielberg’s collaborator. Sometimes I think — oh my God, I’ve disappeared. I’ve become one of the arms of Steven Spielberg, Inc.

That’s scary. But it’s also interesting. The Fabelmans was his life story, and I got to disappear into it. There’s a vanishing of this incredibly cumbersome, heavy apparatus we carry around all the time in order to live in the world.

Part of the joy of art is seeing how far you can move away from it — from whatever lie it represents — into some truth. There’s a Yeats poem where he asks where he got this truth, and answers that it comes from somewhere else.

I’m babbling. Somebody else take over.

Celine Song: What I keep seeing proven is that a really specific subjectivity, precisely because it’s different from everyone else’s, becomes universal. The specific stories are the ones that stand out as universal.

There was a time when people talked about Black cinema as a different genre — a specific area of cinema. And you go: no. That’s just cinema. Black cinema is cinema. Queer cinema is cinema. Asian cinema is cinema.

So I’m always thinking about how we define the thing that’s universal, and where authorship disappears in the landscape we actually live in — where so much is about who the author of the, quote, “content” is. Which is a really disgusting word to me. I don’t like calling things content when people have devoted their whole lives to these crafts.

When you see my cinematographer’s image, you’re not just seeing a pretty picture. You’re seeing his whole life. You’re seeing his childhood in Antigua. You’re seeing his relationship to Kodak film. A whole human being is in that image.

The ego should go away — that’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. A professional makes something to communicate with the world. An amateur is writing a diary.

But making something from the specific place you exist in, in time and space? That’s the only thing that resonates. In my experience it’s the only thing I’ve ever seen become universal.

Have you ever betrayed that?

Lee Daniels: I did a movie called The Butler. Even though I had final cut, it was the first time I was negotiating with people, and I found myself pleasing them rather than pleasing myself.

It wasn’t me. It was what people wanted to see. And okay — it made over a hundred million dollars. So that is what people wanted to see.

But it wasn’t what I wanted to tell. I found myself selling my soul for it. I’m happy with it, but I’m not happy with it as an artist.

That’s the constant balance I’m trying to navigate. Because these big-ass movies are making all the money, and our work isn’t valued the way I think it should be. I don’t know that Precious would be the success today that it was. It’s harder now to get a Precious, a Monster’s Ball, a Hustle & Flow really valued.

That’s the struggle I’m in. Right now. Today.

How did you get to directing?

Lee Daniels: When I came along it was pre-Spike Lee and post-blaxploitation. There wasn’t anybody. I didn’t know what it was. I just knew I could make people feel through performance, and I knew John Waters had affected me, because my aunt slapped me.

I was influenced by European cinema, by John Waters, by Cassavetes — that realness. And I didn’t think Black people were being portrayed. It was all written from a white perspective. None of it was real.

I come from a family of drug dealers and hustlers. I used to be embarrassed to say that, but it’s my life story, so why not. That’s what Empire was really about. And because I knew how to sell, I became a manager — Cuba Gooding Jr., Loretta Devine.

When Monster’s Ball came along I didn’t have the courage to direct it. I didn’t know what an AD was. I didn’t know what a production designer was. I learned all of that on set managing actors. I never went to film school.

So I found Marc Forster, who’d made a beautiful short, and said: you can do this, let me just work with the actors.

Then I produced The Woodsman. Then I got my shot with Shadowboxer — Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. I came back from Toronto, and in the car from the airport I read a review calling it the worst film of the decade.

And I thought: I guess that’s that, then. The critics are right. They know what they’re talking about. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Then Precious came along and I hired a director for it. And I looked at it and thought — this isn’t the story. This isn’t the truth.

So I got rid of them and did it myself.

Let’s talk about the toll.

Craig Brewer: Tony, there was an article in the nineties about your anxiety — I think the line was something like from Pulitzer to Prozac. It was refreshing to read something about the anxiety of what we do. There’s an assumption of privilege: why should you have problems when you’ve got plays on stage and films on screens?

Michael Arndt: I’ll jump in, because I used to sit in a theatre exactly like this. Any time I could, when I was starting out and wanted to be a screenwriter, I’d come to these things and sit in the audience and try to absorb as much as I possibly could.

I got serious about writing at twenty-four or twenty-five. By the time I was thirty-four I’d done nothing but work as an assistant and a freelance script reader. I’d read about a thousand screenplays. I’d written ten of my own and I was sitting down to write my eleventh.

I didn’t have an agent. I had never made a dime writing.

My mom called me up and said: is there something else you could do with your life? Seriously. Is there something else?

And I thought about it — because I came out of film school with dreams of being the next Orson Welles, the superstar. And I decided, no. I just love film too much. Maybe I’m not going to be a writer or a director. But I want to be part of this community. Part of the machinery of making films. Even if I’m only ever an assistant.

I had already written Little Miss Sunshine. I sent it to Sundance and got rejected. I sent it to a screenwriting contest and got rejected. Everything I’d ever written got rejected, including Little Miss Sunshine.

I thought: this is the best f*cking screenplay I can write. I can’t write anything better than this. And it’s all just getting rejected.

So it was a real moment of reckoning. And what I decided was that even if none of my scripts ever got made, I wanted to stay. When you choose to be an artist, it isn’t just the work you produce. It’s the community you’re joining.

In retrospect that’s one of the things I’m most proud of — that I made the decision to stay.

Two or three months later an agent read Little Miss Sunshine and sold it. And everything took off.

But I had failed continuously for ten years.

Does the Oscar fix that?

Michael Arndt: I almost felt like I’d accidentally written a great screenplay. I still had huge imposter syndrome — I thought, how did that happen? Like I’d caught lightning in a bottle.

So I’ve spent the twenty years since analysing story, because there is a craft to narrative.

If you’re a chef, you learn a craft. If you’re a pianist, you put in the time. My thing is: you can’t learn to surf by reading books about surfing. You have to get the board, go in the water, and get pounded by the waves for a long, long time.

I’ve been doing this almost forty years and I feel like I’m only now getting my arms around how stories actually work.

And here’s the other half. We have an onstage self and a backstage self, and you always want to be writing from the backstage self. The part that isn’t the front-facing social you. The stuff you only say to your closest friends, your siblings. That’s the truth you should be putting out there.

Stories are a machine for producing meaningful emotion. They either work or they don’t.

On being seen.

Celine Song: What’s happening — the turning of writers and directors into a brand — is very disturbing to me.

But I believe that in every film I’ve seen any of you make, I can always tell the person behind it. Not always in open ways. Sometimes I’ll see Lee Daniels or Tony Kushner naked in a toilet in the corner of the movie.

To me, that’s authorship.

I want to show up and be open with everyone, and then everybody’s excited, everybody’s happy to come. It’s a place where I can say, hey, this is what I was thinking — and for everyone in the audience to say, yeah, I was thinking that too, can we talk about it?

That drives me more than not wanting to be caught on the toilet. I’m more like: should we all sit on the toilet naked? What do you think?

Tony Kushner: I envy that enormously. There are writers — Suzan-Lori Parks — where I’m mystified when I talk to her, because so much of her work, including the most painful and difficult of it, comes from a place of joy and confidence I absolutely don’t have.

I look at that and think: I don’t know what planet you came from, but how nice for you.

What’s next?

Tony Kushner: I’m doing two limited series and I’m completely miserable with both, because I arrogantly assumed that if I could write a seven-hour play I could write a miniseries. I’m now learning that I know absolutely nothing about television.

I’m sixty-nine. It’s too late. I’m doing it anyway.

I’m adapting Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra for Spielberg. I’m working on a new play and a new musical. And I’ve actually finished something — I co-adapted Death of a Salesman for film with Chinonye Chukwu directing, starring Jeffrey Wright and Octavia Spencer.

Lee Daniels: I’m unemployed.

No, I’m lying. I’ve got a couple of things cooking. I just don’t like talking about it.

Craig Brewer: I’ve got Song Sung Blue out Christmas Day — Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. A true story about a couple in Milwaukee in the nineties who formed a Neil Diamond tribute band, and their family coming together to make their dream happen.

Keep writing. Don’t feel alone.

I’ve been doing this almost forty years and I feel like I’m only now getting my arms around how stories actually work.

Michael Arndt speaking on stage at State of the Story, DGA Theater, New York