YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Moore

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86
first
2016-09-06
most recent
2016-09-06
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Kind of masterful genius. And that was something if you look at the stuff I've done later, you know, imitation game, we always talked about how it's a World War II movie told from the perspective of some mathematicians in a little hut in the south of England. We're not going to show you the war, this kind of majestic, like saving private Ryan style war that you've seen before. We're never going to leave the hut and we're just going to show you what the war felt like for these mathematicians. And then with last days of night, my new book, you know, it's about the kind of great scientific rivalry of the 19th century, which was between, I would argue, was between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nicola Tesla. But the story isn't told from their perspective. It's told from the perspective of this young, ambitious 26-year-old lawyer who Weston House hires to defend himself against Edison's legal attack.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Exactly. Watson's us. Watson's like a reasonably clever guy who does what any normal person would do in those situations and it never worked out because he's not a genius on Holmes' level. And we see, we get a narrator that we can identify with in the presence of this.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And again, that fateful decision to tell the home stories, I think one of the things I learned from Conan Doyle that I've taken with me is finding unexpected perspectives from which to tell stories. One of Conan Doyle's brilliant inventions was that the home stories are not from Holmes' perspective. They're from Watson's. Watson is the narrator. You never go inside of the fine.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And that ends up being a really fateful decision because he kind of exists in this Halcyon murky World where the gas lamps only expose 15 feet into the distance, and it's all kind of dark and mysterious and cool, and there's cobblestones, and it sounds quite glamorous, especially to Americans. And at the same time, I think he was... I don't think Conan Oil necessarily gets enough credit as a writer of dialogue. Holmes is really funny. He's witty and sharp and kind of condescending to everyone else. Yeah.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think, I mean, Conan Doyle did just a masterful job of conjuring London in the 1880s and early 1890s. And one of the really interesting things about the home stories is that one of those sort of really fateful decisions that Conan Doyle made is that he ends up after he brings them back, he writes them over this 30-something year period. He then... He didn't age homes along with the times a couple little times, but basically he didn't. He kept homes in, you know, 1880s and 90s. And that was sort of like James Bond. Yeah.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think that storytelling like that is maybe not even once in a generation. It might be once in a century. I mean, there is a reason those stories have endured so well in the popular imagination.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes, I think in some of the lonely periods of my life that we were discussing earlier as a teenager, I would stay up all night obsessively rereading the self-read.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Why was that the name that everyone knew? So then very mysteriously, seven years later, one day he brings him back. He starts writing more stories. And no one quite knew why. And there was also this other mystery where Conan Doyle kept a diary every day of his life. And when he passed away some years later, one volume of it was missing from his library after his death, and they tried to find this for 80 years people were digging around for it. It was worth millions if anyone could find it. And this one guy sort of claimed that he had, and then shortly thereafter was found murdered in his flat in London. And so I was Captivated by this story, captivated by”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Exactly. He despised Holmes. There was this great story. Where Cunadel's mother writes him a letter and says, oh, can you sign one of your books for my neighbor? She's a big fan. He says, sure, and she says, oh, and can you sign the book Sherlock Holmes? And he's like, even my mother wants me to be Sherlock Holmes. They don't want me to be Arthur. And he had this huge, he was like competitive with his own character. Yeah.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Very much so. So Arthur Conan Doyle had, he kind of wrote the first handful of home stories and then Sherlock Holmes dies, falls off the Reichenbach Falls with his Arch and MSS Moriarty. And then for seven years, every publisher in the world basically is writing Conan Doyle. Literally, they sent him blank checks if you will write more home stories, and he always said, no, I don't want to do it. I'm better than this. He despised the Harry Harry.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, the process of that book started when I was, God, I think I must have been 23, something like that. And it was a true story, sort of two true stories that I combined in the novel, one from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, who obviously wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, and then another true story about the murder under very mysterious circumstances of a Sherlock Holmes scholar in 2003. And so I remember reading about this sort of mysterious death in the newspaper at the time, in the New York Times, and sort of saying, oh my God, this is an amazing story. Like there's so fascinating.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so I go to the yoga place and there's this woman who I've known casually for years because we go to the same yoga place and she comes up to me and she tells me the story and she tells me a story about her daughter. It was like someone you wave to from time to time, and she was like, thank you for saying that. Publicly, and now you, someone I actually know, we can have this conversation about. And you realize there's all these people who Could talk about it more and should hopefully be able to talk about it more.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And what that meant though was that there had been all these people in my life afterwards who did come up to me and talk about it. I went to the next day I go to my yoga place where I go, I live in LA. So this is a routine thing to do. I go to yoga every year. I think it's mandated.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Thing of Wait, damn it, I made myself that promise. Do I really have to do that? But it felt like this thing as we got closer to the Academy Awards and that night I sort of realized, you know what, I made this deal with myself when I was at When things were at their worst, I made a promise to myself then and I got through it and I owe it to the kid who I was then to”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Just bonkers, and it was pretty bonkers. Apparently not. Well, yeah, you don't think, I think it was my way of being like, well, that's never going to happen. So now I never have to do this. Now I never have to talk about it publicly. So my first book comes out. I did press and the movie comes out and we're doing all this press and I never talked about it, never talked about it. And in the back of my mind, there's this little like...”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “They never told me. And that's been one of the lovely things about getting to. Discuss it publicly, which was something so. Point of the story or the end of the story is that I basically said to myself when I was 16, I made myself a deal that was like, I'm never going to discuss this publicly. I'm never going to have this be something that people associate with me. Unless I win an Academy Award, the only time I will ever talk about this is on stage the Academy Awards. And I know that sounds”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Develop a set of tools to learn how to manage it throughout the rest of my life. It was, I felt a lot of shame about it. I felt like, oh, I live in New York now. I'm in college. I don't want this to be the first thing people think of when they see me. I don't want this to be like an elephant in the room of every conversation I have.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I attempted suicide And so we were able to keep. At my request, we were able to keep that incident and this sort of period of my life. Because I think sometimes people talk about it as if that singular incident is like a synecdicy for the whole, and it sort of is, but it really was this kind of long patch of a period of which that was. One moment within it. And I think that, so yeah, it was something that this had happened that I went through this period and that these issues were something that I was going to continue dealing with for my rest of my life. It's not like they ever go away. It's Something one manages and something one learns how to manage. And as I helped”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, I'll tell you this when I was 16 and when I came through When I came through out of the end of the worst patch of it, this sounds crazy to discuss in hindsight, but I made this deal with myself. When you're a 16-year-old who grows up loving movies, you always kind of imagine that like, oh, what if one day I went an academy award? You know, I watch the Oscars every year with my friends and we'd dress up and have a party and do this. And I always said, you know, this isn't something that I'd like to follow me around my whole life. We kept it from the people in school. Most of the people I went to school with didn't know any of this had happened. My friends did a great job of keeping it secret. A lot of my teachers didn't know. I then went off to New York for college where I told no one about this because I didn't want to happen.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I think it's something that people have a hard time talking about. I think it's something that people have a hard time, especially discussing publicly. That's why, by the way,”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yep, he was a doctor. He told me a story. From his life about, it was very funny. It was like he was trying to relate to me. So he told me this very sweet story of, you know, he was in medical school and things were going badly. And it was sort of like the only time that I've ever considered stepping in front of a train was when I was in medical school and bombed a test or something. And it was kind of this endearing story of him sort of trying to relate to me and just make me feel like there was this network and this multi-generational network of people who... Of people who cared about me and depended on me and who were sort of in this with me.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think With the help of the people I was just talking about, I think my brother was great, my mother was wonderful. My grandfather, for whom this novel is dedicated, I remember. He lived in New Jersey. He flew out to Chicago. He spent a weekend with me.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, very much so. But here's the irony of it. I say that now. I say, oh, I had such a hard time feeling like I had such a hard time fitting in and feeling like I belonged. And yet I look back on it and I had a couple of really close friends. I had wonderful parents. I had a great little brother. I had all these people around me who There was this network of people. I just didn't allow myself to acknowledge how meaningful it was at the time.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think, I mean, at heart, honestly, I know this sounds I was just a weird kid. Like, there's no. There's no kind of better way to explain it. Like, I was just really weird. I was socially awkward and I had a hard time in groups and I got panic attacks and a lot of anxiety”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, I think I felt like I was terribly unhappy and I was always going to feel terribly unhappy. And there was nothing that could happen that would make me feel better. There was no event. There was no thing that would happen that would cheer me up. And it sort of felt like, well, if I'm always going to feel this way, if I will never feel differently, then what's the point? Why continue to allow myself to feel this way? And I think, in a sense, for me, the thought was, oh, suicide was the only, it felt like a solution, perhaps not an ideal one, but at least that's something that can be done.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I give them all of the credit for helping me through it and talking me through it and making sure I have always felt like there is a network of people around me who love me and who care about me and who depend on my continued presence as they did then. And I think That meant the world to me when I was 16, and it means the world to me now. I think when I was 16, I went through this very rough patch. And when I came out of it, here's sort of...”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I think one of the tricky things about talking about depression is that sometimes people sort of ask what was wrong? What was the problem? What was the matter? What was the source of this? The trick with depression is that I think it isn't something that responds to external stimulus. It's internal. It is something that happens and there can be things that make it worse and make it better, but it's fundamentally generated within one's own mind and it's not a response. It's not like something bad happened yesterday, so now I'm depressed or something good will happen tomorrow and then I'll be less depressed. It doesn't respond to stimulus in that way. So I think I was a deeply unhappy teenager Was something I was very lucky at that time to have a set of friends around me, a family around me who were very supportive who”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, I always loved writing. I always loved being able to organize my thoughts that way, to really spend the time. And that's, I think, one of the tricks with journalism is that the kind of writing I do, I can spend six years on a novel. I can spend five years on a film, you know, just endlessly redoing it and redoing it and redoing it until I've made the point that I would like to make.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I love technology, but I was really badass at it. There were people around me who were much better at programming than I was, and I feel like that's been a running process throughout my life is finding this intersection of the things that I get really excited about and then things that I seem to be able to do well with. You know, like yourself, there was a moment where I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I loved that kind of writing, but then tried it out for a minute, kind of in college and just after and had a similar experience of like, oh, there's these people around me who are really good at this. And this is a kind of writing that I am not as good at. And so...”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You know, when I was a teenager, I did. I was really into computers and I was a teenager. I went to computer programming camp. I went to space camp. I was that kid. And what I learned as I got a little older was that I loved computer programming, I loved”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “That was his nickname, the Wizard of Menlo Park, as they called him at the time, a nickname that I think he probably invented and propagated. We can talk about his mastery of the press as well. He was a very good nicknamer.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Sometimes people write about scientists as if they're like Merlin. They're these like sort of alchemical masters who come down from a mountaintop with these kind of like the Ten Commandments, these grand proclamations or something.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I went to Columbia. You know, I've known Ben since I was six years old, and he lives a mile away from me in Los Angeles now. And we talk almost every day. And the sense of finding people with common interests who are excited about the things that you're excited about. I think that the lab school was great about allowing students to pursue their own, let's just say, unique and curious set of interests, which I've certainly felt this great freedom to be able to do. You know, I grew up loving movies. I always sort of dreamed of working in movies. I loved fiction. I loved historical pieces. I loved scientists. You know, I tend to write about. Scientists and mathematicians, and I think a real respect for, I grew up with a respect for those people. I think sometimes”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “If you had asked me when I was, I don't know, 10 or 12 or 16 if I thought I was going to grow up to write historical fiction, I think I would have said you're crazy. But I was, you know, I think... I was one of the great things that I took away from lab school and the education I got there are the people I was in school with. My best friend and former writing partner Ben is someone from my class at lab. We moved to New York at the same time. We were both in college in New York.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It was a great place. I mean, you probably know the University of Chicago a lot more intimately than I do. I was just here as a kid, but I grew up in Hyde Park or in Lincoln Park on the north side and then would come down here to school every day. And being like on a university campus, having professors around, you know, a lot of my friends at school were the children of professors. There's this kind of very studious academic-minded. Rigor to the whole thing, which I think in hindsight probably set up a lot of the interests and excitements that follow me into what I do now.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I did. I went to lower school, middle school, and high school at the lab school just a couple blocks away from where we're sitting right now.”

    2016-09-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 76 - Graham Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source