Film & TV, The Creative Process: Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography, Producers, Composers, Costume Design, Talk Art & Creativity

What is consciousness? The mind produces thoughts, sensations, perception, emotions. How can these inner felt experiences be produced within the darkness of the human skull?

Nicholas Bruckman is founder and CEO of People's Television, a production studio and creative agency that produces independent films, and video storytelling for brands. Collaborating with the The Simons Foundation through their 'Science Sandbox' Initiative, he directed Theater of the Mind, which takes audiences into the creative inner workings of Musician and Artist David Byrne’s brain, showcasing Byrne’s immersive theater performance, which attempts to conceptualize the idea of our sense of self and how malleable the mind truly is.

He directed the award-winning healthcare justice documentary Not Going Quietly, executive produced by Mark and Jay Duplass.

John Tracey is Program Director of Science, Society and Culture projects at the Simons Foundation whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences to unravel the mysteries of the universe. The foundation champions basic science through grant funding, support for research and public engagement.

Ian Moubayed started his career as a cinematographer, collaborating with Emmy, Peabody, and Oscar-winning filmmakers. His work includes Netflix’s The Great Hack, NBC Peacock’s The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show, and HBO’s The Vow.

Q: Who is David Byrne?

David Byrne: ...I have no idea.

Most people know me through music, but when I was in high school I saw science and the arts as being equally creative fields. More recently, I just started taking an interest in how the brain works, and there's been this explosion of literature. As much as I love reading about neuroscience, I realize that experiencing some of the phenomena is just on a different level. I wanted to create an experience that shows us we're not who we think we are. Theater of the Mind is an immersive Science Theater project. With this show, I've tried to marry a narrative to the experience of different scientific phenomena that reveal how malleable our perception memory, and identity really are.

To make a production like this work, it's a big invisible team. There's actors, lighting designers sound designers, technical people so it's a really complicated system. This is the Theater of the Mind. How do we operate in a world where we're not sure what's real and what's not. If things are unreliable, then what do we trust? People think of science as being intimidating, but it also doesn't mean that you can't understand it or can't enjoy it. Our emotions, our sense of self, our relationship to other people is all connected to our perception, that you can't separate one of these things from another. They all work together to make us what we are.

www.youtube.com/@sciencesandbox
www.davidbyrne.com
https://nickny.com/bio
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/people/john-tracey/
https://peoples.tv/director/ian-moubayed/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"For me, I don't start a project unless I have a really clear understanding of who the main characters are and why this is a journey that's necessary for them to take. And why are these both the best and the worst people to be in this series? That's the question I ask myself all the time because you need to know: What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are the dramatic tension points going to be where these specific people can really succeed or really fail in this scenario?

I love people who are passionate, and Quentin Tarantino is just so passionate. And I've never been in a writer's room or even really in any kind of development experience where a director was just so passionate and so full of kind of energetic ideas. And that was really inspiring. Somebody who just completely knows their own point of view and gets excited by their own ideas is just fun to watch.

I was about to shoot Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. I was finishing up my work on Star Trek 4, which I had to leave to do Pet Sematary, so I had been working with J. J. Abrams closely for a while on the script, and so I just asked if he had any advice, in terms of just practical stuff on set. And I mean, I've been on so many sets, but still, he's a director who's done so many projects. So he did give me some great advice just about, you know, making it through such long days and taking time for yourself and just kind of keeping your sanity that was kind of the focus of the advice. And he was just very generous and sweet about that.”

Lindsey Anderson Beer wrote and executive produced the hit Netflix original dramedy Sierra Burgess is a Loser before making the jump to direct the horror genre with Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, starring Jackson White and Natalie Alyn Lind. The story is based on an untold chapter of Stephen King's self-proclaimed, scariest property of all time. Up next, she will helm Paramount’s Sleepy Hollow reboot as the writer, director, and producer. She also has several projects in various phases of development and production, including Disney's live action remake of Bambi, New Line's Hello Kitty, and Universal's Fast and Furious spinoff, which she wrote with Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Under her production banner Lab Brew, Lord of the Flies will be directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Patrick Ness for Warner Bros.

www.imdb.com/name/nm5170222/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Lindsey Anderson Beer wrote and executive produced the hit Netflix original dramedy Sierra Burgess is a Loser before making the jump to direct the horror genre with Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, starring Jackson White and Natalie Alyn Lind. The story is based on an untold chapter of Stephen King's self-proclaimed, scariest property of all time. Up next, she will helm Paramount’s Sleepy Hollow reboot as the writer, director, and producer. She also has several projects in various phases of development and production, including Disney's live action remake of Bambi, New Line's Hello Kitty, and Universal's Fast and Furious spinoff, which she wrote with Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Under her production banner Lab Brew, Lord of the Flies will be directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Patrick Ness for Warner Bros.

"For me, I don't start a project unless I have a really clear understanding of who the main characters are and why this is a journey that's necessary for them to take. And why are these both the best and the worst people to be in this series? That's the question I ask myself all the time because you need to know: What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? What are the dramatic tension points going to be where these specific people can really succeed or really fail in this scenario?

I love people who are passionate, and Quentin Tarantino is just so passionate. And I've never been in a writer's room or even really in any kind of development experience where a director was just so passionate and so full of kind of energetic ideas. And that was really inspiring. Somebody who just completely knows their own point of view and gets excited by their own ideas is just fun to watch.

I was about to shoot Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. I was finishing up my work on Star Trek 4, which I had to leave to do Pet Sematary, so I had been working with J. J. Abrams closely for a while on the script, and so I just asked if he had any advice, in terms of just practical stuff on set. And I mean, I've been on so many sets, but still, he's a director who's done so many projects. So he did give me some great advice just about, you know, making it through such long days and taking time for yourself and just kind of keeping your sanity that was kind of the focus of the advice. And he was just very generous and sweet about that.”

www.imdb.com/name/nm5170222/

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, 'Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!' And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that.

Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place."

How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?

Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.

https://jimshepard.wordpress.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?

Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.

"It's a thrill to work with actors you admire. And I got to work with Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston and their wonderful actors. The whole business of film runs on compliments because then if you compliment people, you don't have to pay them. And so I got to be on the set in the Carpathians when they were filming, and I got a steady diet of, 'Oh my God, you're such a good writer. This is such a good screenplay!' And I was just basking in it. As a fiction writer, you don't get that very often. So, I was just happy to have a little narcissistic warm bath and float around in that for a while and imagine myself as Casey Affleck's favorite writer, which I think I was for 30 minutes or something like that.

Cinema is not very good at interiority. Cinema is good at behavior, at action, at allowing us to figure out through exterior signals what's going on...is very appealing to me. So as soon as you tell me that this was the biggest tsunami ever, I'm like, I want to know more about that. And that kind of childlike wonder about the visual is often what drives me to sit down and do a story in the first place. So I start with a much more visual and a much more spectacular, and I'm sure cinema drove me in that direction in the first place."

https://jimshepard.wordpress.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast