YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Moore

lines on the record: 86
first: 2016-09-06
most recent: 2016-09-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He's very self motivated. So he'll sort of say, hey, I just heard about this book. I don't think you're going to want to read it because you're going to think it sounds boring, but I'm going to go look at it. And if there's something in it that's useful, I'll bring it to you. Great. And then also to have someone else who's going through all the same material that I am, who I can sort of talk about it with. Did you think this was interesting? Did you think that was interesting? And he can edit me a little and say, you know, this point of science that you think is fascinating, no other human being on Earth will think this is fascinating. Don't put this in the book.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have faith in the guy. I have faith in the guy, and in helping to find details in things that I think are interesting, and then also what I've found.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a wonderful young man named Kia, who is my research assistant, and he It was sort of a, he came into my life about a year, year and a half ago, and I hadn't had a research assistant before that. And at first, I was very wary of it because it was like, I was so OCD about it that I had to read everything myself and do everything myself. And even now, what I've found is it's hard to sort of completely not go through something myself.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm starting a third novel, and there'll probably be a couple other things in the meantime as we start to get this film ready to shoot.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think that here's where the self competition that I find useful is to say, okay, I've I hope my second book is better than my first. I hope my second film is better than myself. I want to keep pushing myself to do work that I think is better. I think my second book is better than my first. I hope my third book is better than this one.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. I don't, I mean, I guess it's a question of how you think about competing with yourself. And I'm curious to hear how you describe it, but I know I've felt”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, that's well, so I don't necessarily feel like one. I think That was something I felt. It was reading that passage about what it must have felt like to be Paul Cravath was something that felt a little bit autobiographical. And the thing of sort of not feeling like a prodigy, feeling as if I'm doing the same work now, I'm interested in the same kinds of things that I was interested in 10 years ago, and I'm continuing to sort of... Passionately devote myself to the same interests. I think there's also something I've thought about in the last year or two, kind of post-academy awards and all that, is I want an Academy Award at 33, so my most kind of public on television success has already occurred. Like, I'll never have something quite that public again.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be Paul Cravath, and we're working on the rest of the cast now. But it's great. It's a team of people who have wanted to be rejoined with for a while.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's going to play the characters? So my friend Morton, who directed Imitation Game, is directing it. The same producers from Imitation are producing Eddie Redmain, the actor who we've wanted to a bad.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, I know we're almost doing it professionally this time, almost and hopefully the almost is probably because it is the same cast of misfits who made the imitation game kind of behind the scenes are coming together. And who are the guys?”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was there the other day. I was literally last week went to New York and met with my again. Now the book's coming out because they read it and they're being really supportive. And they will not show me the box. And I keep making these jokes about it. I keep being like, hey, so Alan, maybe you just leave me alone in the room with the box and walk away from five minutes and no one knows. And he's like. Graham, that's not funny. Attorneys, that's a violation of ethical rules and has very suggest that we would ever do something like that.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I can't because this box is still protected by attorney client privilege. I, as a non lawyer, did not know this, but attorney client privilege is not waived by death. So the”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Paul is tricky. There's a couple kind of profiles on him from later in his life as a good New Yorker piece from 1932, but we don't have a lot of documentation. And actually, I went to the law firm that still bears his name in New York a while back, and I went in and kind of talked my way into a meeting with the managing partner, whose name is Alan, and described the project I was working on and if they had any documents. And he sort of says, oh, I'll look, and we kind of keep chatting about it. And then at some point, he was like, He was like, well, I mean, I guess I do have this box. I was like, well, okay, Alan, what's in the box? And he's like, well. Box of letters between Paul Cravath and George Westinghouse. That seems useful. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm asking for. Can you show me the box? And he tells me.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They might have been. And especially when we, for a lot of this stuff, we don't have great documentation. We don't know exactly what the conversation was in the room where Westinghouse hires Paul Cravath, his lawyer. So one of the great thrills of Of writing this as a novel is that I got to imagine what it must have felt like for Paul. I got to put the reader inside his head to see the world of 1888, to see these figures. I mean, imagine being this 26-year-old lawyer from Tennessee, and you just moved to New York and now you're staring at Thomas Edison, the most famous man in the world.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a tricky question to answer, and essentially, you know, on a sentence-by-sentence level, one sentence will be completely 100% historically accurate, and the following sentence will be entirely an invention of mine. There's a 10-page author's note at the very end that sort of goes through all the major beats and kind of talks about what's real and what's not and why I've made changes. When I have, we've actually posted on the website. We've made two timelines. So you can see the kind of timeline of events as presented in the novel, and then next to it, you can see the timeline of events in real life and see how they match. The basic idea of it is that every major event described in the book did happen, but not necessarily in that order. And the people I've described as being there, I can't necessarily prove were there.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And this dynamic of what does it mean to make something, I would suggest that to make something as brilliant as the light bulb, you need a bit of all three. I think about this all the time. Like, what am I being today? Am I being like an Edison at Westinghouse or a Tesla? I'm sure you notice it on campaigns and the other group projects you've worked on. You need these different.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brilliant, and he would, in fact, in his diary, in his autobiography, Tesla wrote this very curious autobiography, and he kind of ascribes his technological inventions to his visions and to his voices and says they allowed him to essentially figuratively see the world in a way that no one else had because he was literally viewing the world in a way that no one else had. But Tesla never quite made devices. Like he would have these ideas. And then once the idea worked, he was out. Like the nitty gritty of actually making them function.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quirky guy. I think the word we would use now to describe him, I would suggest, is schizophrenic, that word did not exist then, and it's a little I think it's tricky to diagnose people 100 years later. But he had visions and he heard voices and a lot of these attributes that we associate.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Works for Edison, gets quits slash gets fired, goes off on his own for a bit, then tries to go work for Westinghouse, and then quits slash gets fired. He couldn't work in these corporate environments. He was...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States that shoe, if it was these days, he would have. And so he's this tremendous salesman at the same time, you know, George Westinghouse for me was the craftsman. He wanted to make the best light bulbs. Yeah, he's we're going to take longer and they were going to come out later and they were going to be more expensive, but they were going to be better. They were going to use all the right parts. They were going to last longer, be brighter It was all about crafting perfect products, which I think we can see in many of our inventors or kind of scientists today. And then Tesla, conversely, was this kind of, Tesla was the idea man. He was the guy who...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a crazy time, and Edison was great with the press. I mean, he was the master salesman. I mean, this is the thing that got me excited to write the book, is what I saw in Edison Westinghouse and Tesla were three irreconcilable views of what it means to make something. And I think that was the heart of their disagreement. I think Edison was the salesman. He was going to sell the most light bulbs, and his name was on the cover of every newspaper. His face was rendered in every magazine. He essentially invents the concept of modern branding. He puts the word Edison in the same font with a little oval around it, so it looks like a cattle brand on the side of every product.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ethical standards for newspapers were perhaps not as high in the 1880s and 90s as they were today. Yes, Edison was famous for giving friendly reporters stock in his company in exchange for favorable stories. That is a real kid.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of an infinite amount, and it still hasn't ended. I mean, I think one of the great things about working on something like this is I can even now keep reading about it and keep learning more about it.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The men who work there on shifts. People can get up and work in the middle of the night. Public spaces, parks and whatnot are lit up, and crime rates start dropping precipitously because it's hard to rob someone if it's really bright out. So there's all these great”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. I mean, I think it's easy to take for granted now, but one of the things when I started doing research that just blew me away was reading the diaries, the journals, the letters of people at the time, sort of living through this period when the night sky was being electrified, lit up for the first time. I mean, people described it in their diaries seeing an electric light bulb for the first time as if they had seen a new color. It was something so shocking. Their skin looked a different tone. Their whole experience, the world changed. I mean, it was this massive hinge moment in American history. There's all these cultural changes that start happening because of it. You now can light up indoor spaces 24 hours a day really effectively. So factories can run 24 hours and you can start putting”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've heard. And so, but they just despised each other. And that's what was so interesting to me is how do three People who should have the most in common come to despise each other so much”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading about, as usual, scientists and people who also did that kind of thing. I mean, Edison and Westinghouse invented the light bulb, and I write historical fiction, so I'm not putting these on equal footing. But I think what got me excited was this idea that Edison Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, who's like the third leg in this tripod, they each sort of thought they were the one who invented the light bulb. How did three different people each think they were the one who did this? And they hated each other because of it. These are three guys who should have had the most in common. Like they did the same work. They worked on the same projects. You know, I imagine that when you talk to campaign folks from opposing campaigns, there's this mutual respect and understanding. You guys have the same job.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I just become my first book was coming out, and I had just become a professional writer, you know, just sort of a few months before, and I was kind of going through this whole emotional existential thing of like, what does that mean? Now it is my profession to have ideas and to write about them. And what does it mean to have ideas as your profession and to make things, to create things for a living? And so that got me sort of...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over. So, in response, Westinghouse did something totally insane. Westinghouse hired a twenty six year old attorney who was eighteen months out of Columbia Law School, who had never really had a client before, much less tried a case to be his lead litigator on what I would suggest is the largest lawsuit in American history. And his name is Paul Cravath, and he will later, lawyers in the audience may recognize his name. He will later go on to run what becomes Cravasway and Moore and become one of the most influential attorneys of the 20th century. And this was his first case, the light bulb suit. So I think what got me interested in this was, you know, the time I started working on it, I had sort of...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think one of the things, so the last days of night, my new novel is about, it's based on a true story about the fight between this great rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. It's a true story. In 1888, Thomas Edison sued his arch-rival George Westinghouse over violating his patent on his greatest invention, the light bulb. Edison sues Westinghouse for what was valued to be worth about a billion dollars in 1888. So you imagine that might be the sort of money worth going to court.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly a much happier ending than anything I could have imagined. But so throughout that process, whenever I'd have downtime from the film, I'd be kind of working on this book.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's like that was the idea. The idea was six months off, write the script, send it to Nornito, and this movie's never getting made. I just need to do this. I just need to get this out. And then six months turn into a year and then two years. And then this ends five years later and we're all at the Academy Awards. Yeah.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I write books for a living. That's my job. So I need to get back to my second book, but I'm going to take six months off and...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he was a film student. Who I'd known since the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, I had written a couple things before. I'd never written something like this, a sort of serious piece of drama and historical fiction or history in that case. But Sherlockian taught me how to. I mean, I learned, I think, from that, how to do research and how to kind of. Digest a very long and complicated story into a much smaller period of time. And so, you know, it was just something, the three of us just started it because we loved it and we just thought it was such a beautiful story. And I sort of had this idea of, oh, I'm going to take six months, right? And I had actually just started my second book, The Last Days of Night, which is now six years later, finally out. But at the time, it was like, okay.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had done a little work in television. I had written a couple screenplays with my friend Ben, who was a film. He was a film student.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then began this process of me and Nora and her producing partner, her friend Edo. I start begging them to let me write the script. I did it on spec. They didn't have any money to pay me. I had a little bit of cash left over from the Sherlockian, which had just come out. And so I said, okay,”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted to do this since I was 16. This is how the movie starts. This is how the movie ends. This is the whole thing. And she's like inching away from me, my beat, you know. Who is this psycho? How did he get in my, I'm in her kitchen. So it's like, how did he even get in the house?”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“St. Germain and Vodka. And so I go in and say, hey, it's Graham. No, the other one, thanks for inviting me to this party. And she says, what's going on? What are you up to? I say. And she says, oh, you know, I've been working for a studio for a little while and I hate it. I hate the sort of corporate environment of this. So I've saved up some money for my paychecks and my producing partner and I, we've optioned our first book, and we're going to try and be producers, and we don't know how to do it, but we're just going to, we bought the rights to this book, and now we're going to try and get this movie made. And I sort of say, cheers, have a drink. That's amazing. Congrats on finding a way to start working outside the system. What's the book about? And she says, oh, it's this biography of this mathematician. You've never heard of him. I ask for more information. She says, Alan Turing, and so I instantly...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to this party, and I don't really know anyone. So it's like, all right, I'll go to this party, try and meet some people. And I go, and I see Nora in the kitchen. I remember distinctly she's pouring this like St. Germain cocktail that she always drinks.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got invited to this cocktail party at the house of this woman, Nora, who I barely knew at the time. I'd met her a couple times. She's my age. I think she didn't even mean to invite me. It was like the thing on Gmail where she meant to invite a different gram, but I showed up, so I end up.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I wanted to write about Turing forever my whole life. I just found the story, as you can tell from the conversation we're having, it was like everything that I was interested in in one figure, right? Like all of my interests sort of collided in the life of Alan Turing. And, you know, I got to my first book came out, got to Hollywood, was doing sort of some work here and there. And I'd call around to my agents and managers and say, like, hey, there's this script I really want to write about a gay British mathematician in the 40s and at the end he's going to kill himself. And everyone's like, oh my God, please don't. Like, that's the unmakable film. No one will ever finance that film. No one will ever see that film. So I'd sort of always put it away. And then just after I gotten to LA, I didn't really know that many people in town, but I went to, I”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so this, the Turing story for me was always this great. Is a great source of inspiration and meaning. Here was this guy who won the Second World War and invented the computer, and his name was not popularly known because he was gay and he committed suicide.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would argue that terrible hormones that had gone through his body as a result of the sort of chemical castration process, as well as the public shame of what he'd lost his university position, he couldn't teach. Right.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was so much more than a mathematician. Alan Turing was essentially the guy who, British mathematician, who Essentially, invented the modern computer and led the team that broke the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War, which allowed for, I would argue, won the Allies. However, none of that was known. All that became kind of very secret after the war because a few years after the war, he was arrested by the British police and charged with indecency because it was revealed that he was gay. And that was in 1951 in Britain against the law. He was effectively caught in bed with another man and he was given a choice between two years in prison or chemical castration. He chose the castration because he wanted to continue his mathematical work and a year and a half later he killed himself in response to this”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I feel like I always am privileged to be able to do this, to surround myself with loyal antagonists. You know, my editor, Noah on my novels, is we spend hours and hours on the phone with him begging me to cut this or cut that or something and we fight about it. And he's, I think there is something about, I think I learned making music to trust the opinion of other people. I mean, you play a piece of music for someone and you can see it on their face. They respond to it or they don't. If they don't respond to it, Why? Do you can say, Oh, I respond to it, so go away. But if they don't, I think there's interesting questions about, okay, why is this person not responding to it? Why is this person whose taste I appreciate? Who's the taste I value not responding to it?”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The value of a loyal antagonist of someone who you have the same goal. There's something you're trying to make and it has to be great. And you both want it to be so great and you have different visions of how to get there, I think is, you know, it's frustrating and it's annoying and at the time you may curse the name of the person sitting next to you because it may be that they have”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a reason I like to go back and forth. I found that I like to go back and forth between novels and films. Films are so collaborative. Yes, I wrote the script for the imitation game, but I worked very closely with our producers, Nora Ito and Teddy, with our director Morton. We had... A wonderful”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if you ask me at the time, I thought I was going to go into music. I thought I opened up a small recording studio with my brother and a friend on the lower east side of Manhattan, and I thought I wanted to be a record producer. That seemed, didn't that seem glamorous and fun. As the sound engineers who were in the room with us recording this conversation can attest, it is not glamorous. There is nothing glamorous about this job. But I loved it. And I will say that one thing I learned from that experience from making records with a couple bands was The value of collaborative art.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I start the Sherlock. So, what happened with the Sherlockian was I was 23, I started reading these newspaper stories, being fascinated by this real case, started reading biographies of Conan Doyle, realizing that there was this great idea for a mystery novel here, but I'd never written a novel. I didn't know how to write a novel. I had a day job. I was a sound engineer actually in New York.”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He exists. And in fact, just the day before yesterday, I was in New York at the Take over and we became a name partner, and it still has a huge building in Midtown Manhattan. He becomes, he was a real person. And that was something else that I've found. Think that follows me through the work that I've done is I kind of find these real stories and they seem so fascinating to me. I just want to learn more and more about them and I get obsessively into them. And, you know, when I read, I'd read about Edison before. I'd read about Westinghouse and Tesla before, but I'd never heard the story of Westinghouse's attorney. And he turns out to be one of the most influential attorneys of the 20th century. And that was...”
2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source