YouSaid · the spoken record

J.J. Abrams

lines on the record: 39
first: 2023-01-17
most recent: 2023-01-17
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

“That's really sweet to hear, and I'm grateful. I feel like I think there's nothing more deadly than being in curious. And I think we all like to think that we're curious. And then I think you looked, you'd see that we probably talk more often than we listen. And I know it's a thing I'm working on.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I feel like there are all sorts of things that we try to do to ask opinions, ask outside opinions, have different eyes on things when available, whether it's scripts or cuts, and try and get honest opinions, because that's a harder and harder thing to find the more insulated you get.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We make anything a bad robot, it's mistakes, and we're always learning from them or trying to. One of the things we're doing lately is saying, can we use the different divisions within Bad Robot to be additive and comment on what the others are doing so that if something is happening in theater, what are the TV people think about that and what do they say? Same with features and games or music and finding a way for the company to be less siloed and less protective of what they're doing. Because I think that there is a bit of a territorialism that comes with companies and people don't really want to share their projects or their things. But I'd much rather play out mistakes loudly within the family than have it play out even more loudly outside the family.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is maybe not the one you might expect would be in the room where it happens, having them there, he or she will say something that might just turn your head.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes bringing in people you might not expect at an early level to get their feedback can weirdly start a dialogue where you are being inspired. I remember it happened on the first Star Trek movie we did where we were cutting the movie and working on it trying to find it. And this editor, Jen Horvath, cut a trailer and we had a bunch of trailers that just weren't feeling any good. And every time I saw one of the trailers, my heart sank and I thought, oh, we're dead. Worst thing ever. Jen Horvath cut a trailer with music that you found and all that stuff. And I saw it. It was this moment I'm like, oh, that's what the movie needs to be. Which is to say, like, yes, we already shot the movie. We were cutting it. But seeing it from another point of view, she told me what we needed to do in terms of just the spirit of it. It might have changed things here and there by degrees. But the point is it was a seemingly outside in thing that then from inside out was critical. So I just think sometimes having a voice.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No exaggeration. I think that much, if not most, of the culture building, of the pride by association at the company is through the work the good robot does. Of course, you look at a spreadsheet of the company and you say, well, is this really necessary? Technically, I guess it's not, but technically isn't always the way to look at what a company needs and what builds a culture and what makes people not just loyal, but give their best and show up feeling seen and safe and free to do their best possible work.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The truth is, I never really had a handle on what it is to truly manage and lead a company until I started working more closely with Katie, who had worked at companies and had a sense of it and wasn't coming at it from a folly, creative what-if place. She was coming from a far more practical. These are things you need. You need to have reviews with people. You need to have a bonus schedule. People need to have titles. They need to know who they are. Like things that I'm like, really, does I have to? And of course, it's easy for me just being some creative schmuck who just wants to come in and tell stories and make fun stuff. Of course, it's like she's right on all counts. I didn't realize we needed an HR department. The list of things I didn't understand that were necessary. And then Katie started this thing called Good Robot within Bad Robot, which is our social impact arm. I will say that with”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think it's about kind of being relentless in trying to get to that magical thing. Sixth sense, certainly in the creative world, that I think is just priceless but is so real is the chills. When you get the chills, you can't deny it when you are physically feeling the hair stand up on the back of your neck. And that feeling of oh my god, I'm actually moved It no longer becomes an exercise, it's no longer an intellectual thing, it's an actual physical, you're being touched. The potential of something”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it came so close to never happening But the thing about it is you can get fooled. It was a perfect storm of Damon and this idea and the two of us as new friends and colleagues suddenly working together, whatever we brought to it. The great Sarah Kaplan was the producer, the locations that we had, weird things while we were shooting like it raining and actually helping a storyline that we would not have done the same way had it not been raining. I mean, all these crazy things happening. And I just don't think it's the rule you follow where you say, we'll give every show 12 weeks. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, not the moral. I feel like those kind of constraints can be incredibly exciting and they can also be awful. And I've been in both situations. And I keep promising myself I'll never do that again. It doesn't usually end happily, that story.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For location scouts writing on the plane, which was a really creepy thing when you're riding lost, and then figuring out while we're there, like maybe there should be a polar bear. I mean, it was insane. And before we knew it, we were shooting. Believe it or not, this story gets even crazier. We don't have time to get into every twist and turn, but you can catch the entire exchange in the complete interview which is available to our members. Go to masterscale. com slash membership to learn more. Suffice it to say JJ, Damon, and a vast production team pulled off the seemingly impossible, an impeccably structured, relentlessly mysterious two hour ensemble pilot. ABC loved it. Test audiences loved it. And Los went on to air for six seasons. The magic of the show spread to its massive fanbase, who created entire multiverses of fan fiction and online resources. And the rest was television.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about. And he said, We need the completed pilot done in 12 weeks. Not the script, the whole thing shot and edited and scored. So it was crazy town. Taking a page from the classic entrepreneur's playbook that decided to move faster than they thought they could. JJ and Damon would write the pilot script and JJ would direct. But to pull it off, they would need to stack processes that normally happen sequentially, which had an interesting effect on the script itself. When we started writing the script while we started location scouting, while we started casting, we knew, for example, there would be a couple that didn't speak English. We thought maybe they'd be German. Then we met Yun Chin Kim, and then we thought, oh, they should be Korean. And then we saw an episode of Caribbean Enthusiasm and Hori Garcia was in a scene. I thought, oh my God, that guy's amazing. He's got to be on the plane. And all of a sudden, he was hurling. We started casting people and writing things to the people we were casting and taking trips to Hawaii.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is only a result of that entire campaign of people that are working together to make something great. Nowhere has this method been more apparent than in the creation of one of bad robots, biggest successes. The genre bending, zeitgeist catching, TV series Lost. The story takes us back to two thousand four. ABC was looking to develop a new show, and they tried pairing JG up with another TV writer, Damon Lindloff. We were pitched an idea that was just survivors of a plane crash, and they said we would need an outline in a week. I had never met Damon. I just heard about him. He came in on that Monday and we just started writing this outline. Damon and I ended up writing this outline that we turned in on Friday. I got a call that Saturday from Lloyd Braun who had pitched this thing to me. He was the head of ABC at the time, who said, it's green lit. We're doing it. And I was like, what the hell are you doing?”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that way, I do think that when the people who are coming together don't look the same, the value of that is monumental because you think you know what it is that some other person who doesn't look like you might think or might want or might believe, you don't. In other words, you can create conditions favorable to magic, but you also have to invite a variety of magicians. If you're talking about movies or shows, you're talking about an army. It is never one person. And even when there is the autour, even when that auture is famously and typically a male raving maniac on a set who's wielding their power loudly and viciously, it's not that one person. I cannot stress enough that any work that we have done at Bad Robot that has been any good, and I know that we've done some that is and we've done a bunch that isn't, but I will say that any work that we've done that is any good.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with JJ Abrams. When we left him, he was telling us about the ways bad robot is able to cultivate a sense of play and mystery for the entire team. One way is to create it in their unique physical environment, but at the time of our conversation, the bad robot offices had been shuddered for over a year due to COVID, and yet bad robot as a company hasn't lost that spirit of play. When I asked JJ what he and his team do to cultivate creativity, it wasn't the offices he mentioned. What kinds of things do you do in bad robot to keep limber, keep magical, keep serendipitous? First of all, we have any number of movies or series happening at one time, and we're lucky to get to collaborate with people who are of all different varieties of storyteller. And they bring a different energy all the time. So that by default keeps you a little bit flexible.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point though is that he showed me this thing that was really fun, and I love the idea that I could respond to him with gratitude with something that was a physical object instantly or faster than you might think. And I know that making a hat is not a miracle or no pun rocket science, but it was one of those things that it was fun to get to take advantage of this workshop that Bad Robot has and there's some great artists who work in there. And it was just one of those little things. The fact that he made it the actual logo of the company I did not expect.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went back to the bad robot office and I thought I had an idea for a really boring logo for the boring company. So I made up the logo and I gave it to our workshop and I said, is there any way we could make this hat today? Beth in the workshop took the logo and made the hat and an hour later said, here's the hat. It's the reason we have the workshop, which is to say, it drives me crazy when like all the cool you have to send out for. I don't want to have awesome stuff be made in some mysterious other locations. She made the hat. I had it messengered over to Elon that day. And he emailed back and he said, can I have this? And I said, yes. And he made it the logo of his company. He actually started selling the hats. I think he sold like a quarter of a million of them in a week or something insane.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read that he was starting this company that was going to dig holes to create tunnels. I send him an email. And I said, I want to come see this hole, which I know sounds weird. So I went over to see the hole. And there was this giant boring machine. And he said, I'm going to do this thing, so I'm going to call the boring company. And he showed me this hole, which was really not a very impressive hole. It was at least the beginning of another one of his making a fantasy into reality.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of a sudden, with this building, we had other things like a music studio, and we had an art workshop. We have the laser printers and we have the large format printers and the bookbinders and the silkscreens. And we have all these things to make stuff there.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ended up buying a building in Santa Monica that we completely redesigned someone I went to Sarah Lawrence with, Andy Wasler was the architect.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a good question. The honest answer is I should be reading those leadership books because I'm sure there are some really helpful things to glean. What happened was it started very small.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had at the time two kids, we now have three, and they were four and five. So I had them both say, bad robot together into my laptop. I put that on the little animation and After Effects that I did, and I turned it in. I thought I'll change it later. And I just never changed it. And it just became the company.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't have a company, and I thought about this children's book I wanted to do called Bad Robot. I thought, I'll just call it Bad Robot. So I designed and animated the Bad Robot that weekend.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was doing alias, I had to turn the show in on a Monday, and they said, you need a production card because you have it in your contract, you have a production card.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really about just having people that I could not just bounce ideas off of, but who I could ask to please work on this or work on that and make some room. As a writer, you're doing all of that stuff yourself. There's no delegating as a writer. You know what I mean? You're on your own as a director. I started to realize, oh, there's this amazing thing called the crew and you rely on all those people. You're not meant to light and to dress and to you're hiring and working with collaborating with people who are ideally elevating everything and showing you things that you never expected and making scenes better than you could have imagined. And I thought, God, to do that with a company would really be an amazing thing.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ended up writing a pilot for ABC for the show Alias and then directing that pilot. We had that show on. And while both shows were on at the same time, I would be in the editing room until crazy hours. And it was just, it just felt like it was eating me up and I didn't quite know what I created. And I remember talking to Steve McPherson, who at the time was head of Touchstone Television. And he said to me, you know, it doesn't have to be just you. He's like, you could start a pod, he called it. And I'd never really even heard that term at the time. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you could start a company. I was like, really? So I called my agent at the time and I said, so Steve McPherson says I can start a pod. He's like, yeah. Anyway, the reason it got me excited was not because I wanted to start something for the sake of it, but was because I thought, oh, could I get help?”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started writing this thing and talked about it with Matt Reeves, and it ended up being the show Felicity, which he and I created together and produced together.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had written on a bunch of movies, things like regarding Henry and Armageddon and this movie Joyride. And for a while I found myself, frankly, a bit adrift not knowing quite what I wanted to do because I was doing a lot of rewrites for people and it just was feeling slightly soulless. And Katie McGrath, who is now my wife, when we were dating, she was telling me write what you love, which is so obvious. And yet sometimes you forget the obvious.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started writing as a means to an end because I was working on movies and I knew to write something was an important step to know exactly what you needed to tell a story.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a very small, beautiful, progressive liberal arts college. It felt like a place that was unlike any I had been to before. It was certainly unusual compared to the public schools in LA. And it just felt like an adventure. And it felt strange. And I thought maybe that's what I should be doing.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still to this day, it boggles my mind. So we uh we repaired these movies every single frame remained intact. We returned them and they gave us $300. And I didn't get to meet Stephen for another six years or so. But I stilted this day don't understand why Kathy, she is so brilliant and that move is so insane. So it doesn't make sense to me.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She had this idea to give those two movies instead of giving them to, say, the Smithsonian, she had the idea of calling two utter strangers that were 15 years old. We weren't 30 years old between us. And she gave us these movies that needed to be repaired would we be available to repair them. Which, of course, we were available to repair them. So we got these two movies, and these are not copies. These are not like you could sort of run a dupe of these. That was the only one.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She called Matt and said that she saw this article on us, and they had just found Stephen's 8mm films. They had been left in a house, in an attic, in a box, and a guy had found them and brought them to Universal Studios and delivered them.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matt Reeves is a director and writer, and I were in a Super 8 film festival, and there was an article that the LA Times wrote about the kids who had movies in the festival, and it was called The Beardless Wonders, as if we weren't already self-conscious. This article came out and we got a call from Kathy Kennedy. Kathy Kennedy at the time was Steven's assistant.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was 11 and 12 and 13, he had offices at Columbia Pictures and then another time at Paramount Pictures. And I would go, I remember, and I would just wander around and I'd find out like what was shooting and I would just peek in and sneak onto sets and watch what they were doing. And this was when they were shooting TV shows like Happy Days and Lavern and Shirley and Mork and Mindy. I'd sit in the empty bleachers and I'd watch them rehearse and all the actors in their civilian clothes. And the idea of being anyone on the floor was my dream. I thought maybe Special Effect Makeup, maybe being a DP or working with set design. It didn't matter to me. The idea that you could as a grown-up play and that that could be a way of making a living, it just seemed miraculous.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny, I think as soon as you feel that you have a process, somehow that process betrays you. I think that my true answer is I think not knowing can be your friend.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say about the magic box that it is both a real thing that I have here in my office and something that when I talked about in that TED talk, I only did it because my friend and co-producer, Brian Burke, at the time, said, talk about that box. I don't ever think about the magic box when I'm working on a project. And it's become this thing where people are always like, so you're using the magic box. I'm like, I don't use the magic box. It's a metaphor.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love physical objects. Was this book that Doug Dorst wrote that he and I collaborated on that was called S. Came in this sleeve when you pulled the book out, you saw there was all this ephemera within the book, within the pages you could actually take out. You looked on the pages of the book and you saw all this handwriting in different colored ink, and you realized there was a story on top of the story. And all these little objects that came with it were part of it. There was something about creating a book where the book as an object, as a means of telling a story beyond just the pages of a novel, just felt like a worthy and a fun idea. And I wanted to live in a world where that happened”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say foam latex tongue from the exorcist that Dick Smith sent to me when I was, I think 14 or 15 after writing him a note, a fan letter. And the note said, And put your tongue, which I've never done because I just didn't want to so I have it in the same box in which he sent it.”
2023-01-17 · Masters of Scale · J.J. Abrams: Make room for magic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT