A Curious Mind (18 page)

Who's going to try out for the musical this year?

Maybe we should have an adventure this weekend. What would you like to do Saturday afternoon?

How many marriages that drift into disconnection and boredom could be helped by a revival of genuine curiosity on both sides? We need these daily reminders that although I live with this person, I don't actually know her
today
—unless I ask about her today.

We don't just take our relationships to those closest to us for granted. We take for granted that we know them so well, we know what happened today. We know what they think.

But we don't. That's part of the fun of curiosity, and part of the value of curiosity: it creates the moment of surprise.

And before the moment of surprise comes the moment of respect. Genuine curiosity requires respect—I care about you, and I care about your experience in the world, and I want to hear about it.

This brings me back to Ron Howard. I feel like I know Ron
as well as I know anyone, and I certainly rely on him in professional and personal terms. But I never presume I know what's happening with Ron, and I never presume that I know what his reaction to something is going to be. I ask.

That same kind of respect, curiosity, and surprise is just as powerful in our intimate relationships as it is at work. In that sense, every conversation can be a curiosity conversation. It's another example of curiosity being fundamentally respectful—you aren't just asking about the person you're talking to, you are genuinely interested in what she has to say, in her point of view, in her experiences.

At work, you can manage people by talking at them—but you can't manage them very well by doing that. To be a good manager, you need to understand the people you work with, and if you're doing all the talking, you can't understand them.

And if you don't understand the people you're working with, you certainly can't inspire them.

At home, you can be in the same room as your partner or your kids, but you can't be connected to them unless you can ask questions about them and hear the answers. Curiosity is the door to open those relationships, and to reopen them. It can keep you from being lonely.

And by the way: I love people being curious about me. I like it when people ask me interesting questions, I like a great conversation, and I like telling stories. It's almost as much fun to be the object of curiosity as it is to be curious.

Curiosity isn't necessarily about achieving something—about driving toward some goal.

Sometimes, it's just
about connecting with people. Which is to say, curiosity can be about sustaining intimacy. It's not about a goal, it's about happiness.

•  •  •

YOUR LOVE FOR SOMEONE
can, of course, also fire your curiosity on their behalf.

My oldest son, Riley, was born in 1986. When he was about three and a half years old, we realized there was something different about his nervous system, about his psychology, and his responses. Riley's mom, Corki—then my wife—and I spent many years trying to understand what was happening with him developmentally, and when he was about seven years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

It was the early nineties, and treatment for Asperger's then was even more uncertain than it is today. Riley was a happy kid. He was socially oriented. We wanted to help him connect with the world in the most constructive way possible.

We tried different styles of education. We tried some weird glasses that changed his vision. We tried Ritalin—though only briefly. Getting Riley the help he needs has been a constant journey, for him and for his mother and for me.

As Riley was growing up, I started thinking about mental illness, and the stigma attached to it. I had survived stigma myself, of course, because of my reading disability. Riley is a gracious and delightful person, but if you don't understand how
the world looks to him, you might be puzzled by him. I wanted to do a movie that really tackled the issues around mental illness, that helped destigmatize it. I was always watching for an idea.

In the spring of 1998, Graydon Carter, the editor of
Vanity Fair
, called and told me I had to read a piece in the June issue, an excerpt from a book by Sylvia Nasar called
A Beautiful Mind
, that told the life story of John Nash, a Princeton-educated mathematician who won the Nobel Prize, but who was also plagued with devastating schizophrenia. The magazine excerpt was riveting. Here was a story about genius and schizophrenia braided together—of achievement, mental illness, and overcoming stigma—all in the life of a real man. I was thinking about Riley even as I was reading the pages in
Vanity Fair
.

I immediately knew two things. I wanted to make a movie of
A Beautiful Mind
and the life of the Nobel laureate mathematician who was also schizophrenic. And I wanted it to be the kind of movie that would reach people and change their attitudes, even change their behavior, toward people who are different—disabled or mentally ill.

Part of the power of
A Beautiful Mind
comes from this remarkable insight: It isn't just hard for outsiders to relate to someone who is different. It's hard for the person who is mentally ill to relate to everyone else. That person struggles to understand how the world works too, and struggles to understand people's responses to him.

There was an auction for the movie rights to
A Beautiful Mind
,
and as part of the auction, I sat and talked to Sylvia Nasar, and also to John Nash himself, and his wife, Alicia. They wanted to know why I wanted to make the movie, and what kind of movie I wanted to make.

I talked a little bit about my son, but mostly I talked about John Nash's story. I'd already produced two movies at that point that involved buying the rights to the stories of real people—
The Doors
and
Apollo 13
. You have to tell people the truth about the movie you want to make from their lives—you have to tell them the truth, and if you get the movie, you have to stick to what you promised.

I told John Nash that I wouldn't portray him as a perfect person. He's brilliant, but also arrogant, a tough guy. That's important. He has a beautiful love story with his wife. I said, “I want to do a movie that celebrates the beauty of your mind and your romance.”

And that's the movie we made—that's the movie the screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, was able to write, the movie Ron Howard created on screen as director, those are the people that Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly were able to bring to life so vividly.

While we were in the early stages of working on the movie, I was thinking about how to convey how the mind of a schizophrenic works—how to show that on screen. Sylvia Nasar's book doesn't have this sense of alternate reality. But I didn't want the movie of
A Beautiful Mind
to simply portray John Nash from the point of view of the people around him. That wouldn't provide
the revelation or the connection we were looking for.

The solution came one day before
A Beautiful Mind
was too far along. Riley and I were watching Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
together. There's a vivid scene in
The Shining
where Jack Nicholson is in a bar, having conversations with people who don't exist. It hit me immediately. I thought we should find a way of showing Nash's reality—show how the schizophrenic mind works by showing what the world looks like from his point of view. And that's what we did: John Nash's reality is shown in the movie no differently than everyone else's reality.

Akiva Goldsman got that idea perfectly—and I think it's the source of the power of the movie itself, in addition to the portrayals by Russell and Jennifer, of course.

The movie was more than a success. It did well financially. It won four Academy Awards—for Ron and me for best picture, for Ron for best director, for Akiva for best adapted screenplay, for Jennifer for best supporting actress. And John and Alicia Nash were with us at the Academy Awards that night in 2002.

But the real success is that the movie has affected so many people's lives. People came up to me on the street—people still come up to me—and say, You've helped me understand what my child or my niece or my mother is going through. I remember being at a Ralph's supermarket in Malibu not long after the movie came out, and a woman came up to me and told me she was brought to tears by that movie.

It isn't just that I did
A Beautiful Mind
because the story touched me personally. The way we did it came directly from my own experiences. And the way we did it, to me, makes it such a powerful, and such a valuable, movie. My curiosity and determination to help Riley led me to
A Beautiful Mind
. And my experience being his father, and watching how he experiences the world, led us to a totally original treatment of mental illness.
A Beautiful Mind
is unquestionably the most gratifying movie I've ever made.

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.”

—Carl Sagan
¹

THE MOVIES WE'VE MADE AT
Imagine have a great variety of settings, stories, and tones.

We made a movie about achieving the American dream—and the central character was a semiliterate African American
man trying to climb the ladder of the heroin trade in New York City in the 1970s. That movie,
American Gangster
, is also about the values of American capitalism.

We made a movie about the power and the passion of high school football in rural Texas. It's a movie about how boys grow up, how they discover who they really are; it's about teamwork and community and identity. It's also about disappointment, because at the climax of
Friday Night Lights
, the Permian High Panthers lose their big game.

We made a movie called
8 Mile
about a hip-hop artist—a white hip-hop artist.

We made a movie about the movie
Deep Throat
, and how that pornographic film about oral sex came to define a critical moment in our culture.

We made a movie about a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician—but
A Beautiful Mind
is really about what it's like to be mentally ill, to be schizophrenic, and to try to function in the world anyway.

Two things are true about all these movies.

First, they are all about developing character, about discovering flaws and strengths, and overcoming your emotional injuries to become a full person. To me, the American dream is about overcoming obstacles—the circumstances of your birth, a limited education, the way other people perceive you, something inside your own head. Overcoming obstacles is itself an art form. So if the movies I make have a single theme, it is how to leverage your limits into success.

Second, no one in Hollywood really wanted to do any of them.

I've talked about using curiosity to get around the “no” that is so common in Hollywood and at work in general. The first reaction to most ideas that are a little outside the mainstream is discomfort, and the first reaction to discomfort is to say “no.”

Why are we glorifying a heroin dealer?
²

Shouldn't the football team win the big game?

Who wants to watch a whole movie about a struggling white hip-hop artist?

For me, curiosity helps find ideas that are edgy and different and interesting. Curiosity provides the wide range of experience and understanding of popular culture that gives me an instinct of when something new might resonate. And curiosity gives me courage, the courage to have confidence in those interesting ideas, even if they aren't popular ideas.

Sometimes you don't just want to attract the crowd to something mainstream, you want to create the crowd for something unconventional.

I like projects with soul—stories and characters with heart. I like to believe in something. I like the idea of the popular iconoclast—doing work that is at the edge, but not too far over the edge.

That's when I run into something very important, and very contrarian. I run into the limits of curiosity.

Sometimes you need anti-curiosity.

When I have an idea I love that is unconventional, eventually I have to say, “I'm doing it.”

Don't tell me why it's a bad idea—I'm doing it. That's anti-curiosity.

Anti-curiosity isn't just the determination to grab hold of an interesting idea and push forward in the face of skepticism and rejection. Anti-curiosity is something much more specific and important.

It's the moment when you shut down your curiosity, when you resist learning more, when you may have to tell people, No, that's okay, don't tell me all your reasons for saying no.

Here's what I mean. When you're building financial and casting support for a movie, you have already built the case for the movie for yourself, in your own mind. You have gone over and over why this story is interesting, why the script is good, why the people you want to make the movie match the story and the script.

Everyone in Hollywood knows how to “make the case.” That's what we do with each other all day long. And any successful producer or director or actor is great at “making the case.”

When someone tells me “no,” you'd think I'd be immediately curious about why they're saying “no.” Maybe they're hung up on something small, something I could fix easily. Maybe four people in a row will make the same criticism, will give me the same reason they are saying “no”—and why wouldn't
I want to know that? Maybe after I hear why an idea isn't winning support, like a smart politician reading the opinion polls, I'll change my mind.