Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Tim Miller: Ready, Fire, Aim!
Tim Miller, the creative mind behind blockbuster hits like Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and the Netflix hit Love, Death & Robots, gives us an insider look into his incredible career. From his early days in Southern Maryland, to his initial dreams of becoming a comic book artist, Tim’s path is both inspiring and filled with unexpected turns. Discover how his love for drawing and reading turned into a passion for filmmaking, visual effects, and storytelling.
What does it take to adapt beloved books into films while staying true to the essence of the original material? Tim shares his experiences and challenges in doing just that, as well as his journey from waiting tables to working in medical film animation, eventually leading to a groundbreaking career in 3D animation and visual effects. Hear about his pivotal move to Los Angeles, his tenure at Sony Imageworks, and the defining moments that gave him the confidence to start his own visual effects company.
Tim dives deep into the collaborative nature of filmmaking. From valuable insights into mentorship and advice from industry titans like James Cameron and David Fincher to personal anecdotes revealing the importance of humility and collaboration, this episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for aspiring filmmakers and creatives alike.
www.slightlyprod.com
A VFX supervisor walked through the machine room and said hey, did you do that? And I said yeah, and he goes it's pretty good, you're looking for a job. And I became completely obsessed because it married the two things that were interesting to me science fiction, living in this idea of tomorrow, and art.
Jennifer Coronado:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is. I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say, and now as they say on with the show, tim Miller is a creative, a VFX entrepreneur, a director of such films as Deadpool and Terminator, dark Fate, and also a writer and executive producer on the Netflix series Love, death and Robots. Tim is also known as being a pretty frank person, so we're excited to have the chance to talk to him today about his life's path. Tim Miller, welcome to Everyone Is.
Tim Miller:Thank you very much. Where did I get that reputation for being frank?
Jennifer Coronado:Well, I've seen lots of interviews with you, but I've also heard it from people working in the industry. I want to start at the very beginning. I want to start at your superhero origin story. So where'd you grow up?
Tim Miller:I grew up in middle-class household in Southern Maryland, right across the river from DC place called Fort Washington. It was great. It was a great place to grow up. My dad was an interior designer. Although he didn't graduate from high school. He faked a degree from college and got into the National Association of Interior Designers and my mom ran our business and she was very creative and she made these little miniature figures. And my dad was very creative. He was a writer, he wanted to be a writer and he wrote a lot. But he also had a great eye and, even though he never graduated high school, he did a room in the White House and we did all kinds of stuff for the government and things like that. I hung a lot of drapes, delivered a lot of furniture.
Jennifer Coronado:So you were surrounded by creatives as a kid.
Tim Miller:Yeah, not in the way that you get when you're out here in Hollywood where you do this for a living and it's all day, every day, which is great, but people that I think in an older time there were a lot of creative people that really just had followed sort of a traditional path for their work, but then creativity sort of bubbles up and comes out in all kinds of places in their lives, and so it was always there.
Jennifer Coronado:Did your parents encourage you to draw? Because I know as a little kid you liked drawing as well.
Tim Miller:Yeah, and I wanted to be a comic book artist and realized I wasn't good enough and I always drew. And then I wanted to be an illustrator and in fact I was a freelance illustrator for a while, but I was also weighing a lot of tables to make money. I just love to draw, I would draw anything. And I started by by, like a lot of artists too, I would copy frank frazetta and comic books and I painted. You know, my closet doors were john layton's iron man covers and the bottom of my bed was a roger dean green slate painting and my bookshelves had wolverine fighting the Hellfire Club painted on them, and so I was always copying and then I would do my own stuff too. And that's really what I wanted to be was an editorial illustrator.
Jennifer Coronado:So, when it comes to comic books, did you find, as a young person, you're like this is the artist I love, or were you just drawn to the stories first, or what was the thing that drew you in there, that made you want to be in that space?
Tim Miller:I've always been kind of a nerdy, really simplistic guy who likes heroes and villains, and I like my moralizing very black and white, and I think I was very drawn to comic books and it combined the two things that I loved most. I loved to read. My dad was a huge reader and he gave me A Princess Bride in fifth grade and I locked myself in my room for three days and I came out and said what happens next? I must know. And then it was every book that Edgar Rice you know 27 Tarzans and every book that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote, and then it was Robert E Howard and so on and CS Forrester and I've never stopped. So comic books was really the marriage of those two things. It was the written word and stories and illustrations, and I can't tell you why I was drawn to one artist or another. I certainly had my favorites.
Jennifer Coronado:It's so interesting. You say that when I was a kid I loved books so much. I would walk around the house and count how many books we had in the house because I found it very comforting to know that we had all of these books that were surrounding us, because there's so much. Also, you know, comic books are awesome. I loved those as a kid. But there's something to be said about other types of books where it's all your imagination that's generating the imagery. That's why it's always so amazing when you see like a film, that actually kind of connects to the book, because sometimes there's big misses, because you can put so much more in a book and it comes from you individually.
Tim Miller:You know, all too often I've heard writers where I've worked with writers who who are adapting material and and they just don't give a shit about the source material. And and I guess if you're hired to adapt a book and and perhaps it's not a book that you love, maybe you feel, maybe you don't love it because it's not your taste and you feel less precious about it. But all the books that I've adapted, I adapted them because I love them and I do think that maybe a particular skill I have is how you can adapt it without ruining what is, you know, most essential. Why do I love this book? You have to change things, you have to compress time and you have to drop characters, and how do you do that without ruining the thing that you love? Because if that's the case, then probably shouldn't adapt it anyway.
Tim Miller:But we've worked with a lot of writers and they're kind of rock stars to me, especially with Love, death and Robots, because between that and some other things we've done about 50 short films. Four, I think, were originals, but the rest were stories that I found and really liked by different authors and we have relationships with them. So I don't want to say, yeah, sorry, I fucked your story up. I try and be as respectful as I can and I think even when I change things, they understand why and for the most part they either agree or pretend to agree, and occasionally they've said well, what if you did this instead? Because I think this is important, I listen, because it's their thing. You know, they created it, I'm just adapting it.
Jennifer Coronado:It came from their brain and their soul and their heart right.
Tim Miller:Absolutely. But I'm not going to adapt Neuromancer and throw away what William Gibson did, right, I can't even imagine, in fact, my Neuromancer adaption, bill Gibson said was too beholden to the book, which I thought was kind of funny.
Jennifer Coronado:That's really funny. So you're this East Coast kid. You went to school for illustration and animation, yep, and then you went to Hollywood. How did that come about?
Tim Miller:There was a lot of stops in between. When I got out of college I was trying to start a career as an illustrator and I would get the occasional gigs, but I had waited tables all through college and high school and I continued to wait tables. I like waiting tables actually, it's a job that makes time go fast and you can make good money. And so I waited a lot of tables and did that. And then my wife's father had an ex-student who worked at a place in Baltimore that made medical films and if you got, say, glaucoma, your doctor would sit you down and say, watch this film about glaucoma and charge you for that time while you were sitting in his office watching a film.
Tim Miller:So the first film I directed was so you have an STD. I'm not making that up, that's a true story. But they said, hey, we do the animations to illustrate the concepts, the medical concepts, with this computer called a Dubner 20K. I had never worked on a computer before, except, you know, I'd seen the little Macintosh, black and white, and maybe an apple too, but never was interested in it to any extent. And then this was a 20 256 color paint system with some limited animation yeah and so I started on the night shift and I thought it immediately.
Tim Miller:I thought it was the greatest thing in the fucking universe and I became completely obsessed because it married the two things that were interesting to me science fiction and living in this idea of tomorrow and art. And so I became completely obsessed. And then they got a better computer system and I became more obsessed. And then I got a job in Washington DC again. So I moved from Washington to Baltimore and then back to DC. And then I got a job in Washington DC again. So I moved from Washington to Baltimore and then back to DC, and while I was working at this post house doing opens for the discovery channel and things like that on a compositing system, they asked me to demo out at NAB, which is a big conference, and while I was there somebody with a post house in Los Angeles said hey, you want to come out here?
Tim Miller:Back then in the early nineties Los Angeles was the Mecca of computer graphics. It was where all shit was happening and I had a friend out here, jerome Chen, who's one of the big VFX supervisors at Sony. He did a bunch of Spider-Man movies, black Fury, and Jerome was working out here at a post house and he's like dude, it's fucking great. You know I'm working on music videos. So I said, yeah, I'll come out, I'll come out and do that. So I came out and worked at this place called Action Video and I was a compositor and I wanted to learn 3D. Because I got so tired of asking the 3D artist, because I got so tired of asking the 3D artist, I bought a PC and taught myself 3D because I said, well, fuck, I'll make my own. And then that led to a job at Sony Imageworks.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Tim Miller:Showing my friend Jerome some work I had done at home in my spare time a little personal project and a VFX supervisor walked through the machine room and said, hey, did you do that? And I said yeah, and he goes, it's pretty good. Are you looking for a job? And I said no, he goes. Well, you want one Because they needed animators. And so I was hired as an animator, which I had zero training.
Jennifer Coronado:Wait, wait, wait. Literally. You accidentally got hired as an animator.
Tim Miller:Yeah, I was a compositor. That wasn't my main focus, but I loved animation and so I said, sure, I can do it. I always had an abundance of confidence.
Jennifer Coronado:Where does that come from? Where does that abundance of confidence come from? Do you think?
Tim Miller:I think my parents weren't really that interested in what I was doing, to be honest, they were super supportive, but they weren't unsupportive either, right? So I would go, hey, I want to be an artist. And my dad would go, all right, sure, why not, you know? And I'd go, ok, and I'd be, and I'd be an artist.
Tim Miller:But it came from I don't know being lucky. I don't know being lucky, I mean, I often think in the lottery of life I was given so much that people consider things that shouldn't be an advantage, like being a dude. But let's face it, it is. Being a white dude again, shouldn't be an advantage, but it is, I have to admit. And being lucky enough to be born in a household that could send you to college hugely fucking fortunate. Being born in america, also usually forced. So I mean I'm already in like the top, oh, one percent of lucky. And if I fucked it up, I mean I would have to be some kind of idiot, right, and I had a little bit of talent, that that if, if you work hard enough, you can, you can make it count more because you've, you've, you're given opportunities that other people don't have.
Jennifer Coronado:Luck really you started your own visual effects company, blur, and you were pretty young and you started in the 90s. What gave you the comp? So is that all this stuff that you built on? Is that what gives you the confidence to start your own company, or did you want to set your own rules? What drove you towards that?
Tim Miller:um or wrong, but I believed it. You know Jeff Fowler, who is a blur director, directs the sign movies. Jeff says you know Tim Miller, frequently wrong, but never in doubt. Somebody, somebody else said the other day uh, tim Miller, ready fire aim. Um, I thought that was funny, uh. So I think that comes from maybe too much confidence.
Tim Miller:But honestly, when you get down to it, when I left Sony really because I didn't want to be an entrepreneur, I'd worked on Hideaway and I'd worked on Johnny Mnemonic moved to the PC department at Sony, which was nothing back then because they were doing Johnny Mnemonic, which was one of my favorite short stories, and I knew PCs. And even then I could see the writing was on the wall that you know my. I worked in a department where my workstation cost about $40,000 and the software that ran on it was like another $40,000. But at home I was working on a PC that costs like $2,000 and on software that costs about $1,200. And I'm like I can do 60% on this and every year it gets better, every six months it gets better. I saw the writing on the wall that it was all going to change and by the time I left Sony it was because you could buy the software and the hardware without you know a million dollar investment. So we took a $20,000 loan and bought three computers.
Jennifer Coronado:Who's the we in that case?
Tim Miller:It was this woman named Kat Chapman who was our department manager in the Sony previs department, that's who worked on Johnny Mnemonic, even though we did final shots. It was the previs department, that's who worked on Johnny Mnemonic Even though we did final shots. It was the previs department. It was her and another artist named David Stennett and then eventually my best friend from childhood, who is a programmer, became our CTO, joined in year two, and then Jennifer Miller, who I was married to and was a designer. She joined in like year three. We went pretty quickly from like three people to 20 or so and maybe within the first year, year and a half, and then we kind of just kept growing.
Jennifer Coronado:You started a business and you're a creative person and sometimes those things don't map Like. Sometimes it's people who are creative, they're challenged on one side, or the business people are challenged on the creative side. So who took what role in that setting up of a company? Were you driving most of it or how did you look at it?
Tim Miller:Before I answer that, I'll just say the answer to your. The first part of your question was did it come from an abundance of confidence that I was able to start the company? But I will say that at sony, after we finished johnny mnemonic, I said let me go get some work like battlestar galactica or deep space nine. All that stuff was being done on pcs, right. And I said we'll get that stuff for their apartment because it's fucking cool. And Sony wasn't interested, it wasn't worth their time, and so they didn't want that. And so I said, well, I'll go get it, let me just try. And they said, no, we don't want that. And so I'm like, okay, well, I guess I have to start my own company. I had some job offers to go back like make a lot of money and be a compositor on commercials and music videos and stuff, but I'd had enough of that.
Tim Miller:I didn't want to do it anymore and I've never really cared about money, and so anyway I said, okay, well, let's just start our own company. How hard can it be right? And maybe it sounds a little scary, but really, if we failed, what happens? We go back to our high-paying jobs in the visual effects industry, I mean, you know, and sign your house as collateral for an equipment purchase. It felt like a low risk.
Jennifer Coronado:How do you make that transition and were you the one guiding that? How are your business partners working with you?
Tim Miller:I'm not a smart business guy, but I'm pretty practical and and, and though I don't care about money, I understand that people aren't going to work for you unless you pay them, uh, and you need to pay rent, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact that I didn't really care about money, I think it was an advantage, even though most of the time people thought it wasn't an advantage, and I'll explain that. We would do a job, we would underbid it or our own creative expectations were more than the budget allowed, just because we were artists and wanted to do something super cool and I was willing to lose money to make it happen. If I just cared about the money, I would say, well, look, let's just do the minimum to make the client happy and keep them coming back. But I was never trying to keep the client happy, I was trying to keep me happy, right. So we would go above and beyond and if it wasn't good enough, we would lose money, versus going to the client and say, look, we're sorry, we're asking for more money because you can't follow your work around and go yeah, it's not that good, but honestly, the client didn't give us much money or we didn't have enough time or we got fucked in some way. So there is no excuse to put out bad work. I mean, there are excuses but nobody wants to hear them. So I did everything I could to not have that happen, even to the detriment of the company and the people.
Tim Miller:Sometimes we had a bit of a rep as a sweatshop, but it was never because we were making money. It was because we wanted to do better work than perhaps we were getting paid to do. But over time that builds a very loyal clientele and it attracts better artists because the work is better and that pays real dividends in a. In a business where the work is your calling card dividends. In a business where the work is your calling card, if it's great work, artists want to come and clients want to work with you, and then the money kind of takes care of its. Well, I'm not going to say that because that's insulting to producers. The money doesn't take care of itself, but the work becomes the thing that defines you.
Jennifer Coronado:I heard someone who interviewed you once say blur is like a gym. You go there when you want to get buff. What do you think he meant by that?
Tim Miller:Because expectations are very high. I can't tell you what it was. I mean I always worked hard in long hours and back in the days when we didn't get OT or anything, because I loved it, I was interested, I wanted to do good work and again, I didn't care about money and I was so into it and so that attitude pervaded probably the first 15 or 20 years of Blur and we had an all staff model. We didn't pay overtime, we tried to compensate people by saying take comp time, take the weekends off when you can, and things like that. But we didn't really track it and it was full of a lot of young, aggressively eager people who were just trying to do great work and everybody was competing with everybody else in a healthy way. I mean, we had a good time and a lot of these guys, like Richard Bluff, your friend, would say it was some of the best times of their lives, even though we're working our asses off.
Jennifer Coronado:What are some of your proudest accomplishments? I can tell you what my favorite work of you guys is. I love the credits for the girl with the dragon tattoo. Yeah, I thought that was so creative and so visually interesting and really was tonally exactly what the film needed.
Tim Miller:Thank you. Yeah, I'm certainly proud of that. I would never put it at the top of my personal list, because so much of that was Fincher, because so much of that was Fincher, even though David was very he's very hands-off, but also very hands-on At the beginning he sends me an email with eight words, that's it. And then I said okay, yeah, well, we're in. And then I said what do you want to do? And he said I want to tell the whole story of all three books in two and a half minutes. I read all three books and came up with a visual style. We put a bunch of ways like we could handle sort of abstract vignettes, and he really liked this, these performance art pieces where this dude would go into a museum and pour black oil all over himself and stand in a corner weird and he's like I, I want that.
Tim Miller:That black on black dream stuff is what he called it. So I said okay, well, what do you want the vignettes to be? And he goes I'll get back to you. And then, and after a day or so, I just said well, how about if I write a bunch and you can tell me which ones, um, you like? And so I wrote like 50 and I thought oh well, he'll pick 20. But he said these are all great, go.
Jennifer Coronado:You know how many takes, he does. Come on.
Tim Miller:We just we just get along really well, he's exacting, but so are we. There were many things like. Rockfish was a huge thing for me. I worked so many hundred hour weeks and I was very proud of it. Love, Death and Robots is a huge thing.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah.
Tim Miller:Deadpool in a very different sort of a way, but I'm prouder of Love, Death and Robots, to be honest.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, I'm excited to see what you have. I do want to dig into Deadpool a little bit, because I famously remember that you guys did a test that helped get the film greenlit, and I think you focused on that movie for like five or six years before it was done. So how did that all come about and why was that important to you?
Tim Miller:There's an executive at Fox named Drew Trevello who's still a very good friend and he's a writer now. But Drew was working on X-Men First Class and he saw a DC Universe piece DC Universe Online piece I did which was a big superhero fight, and he was working on X-Men First Class, and he said hey, you know any chance you? He tracked me down and said, came down to meet at Blur and said you clearly understand superhero action, would you help design some action for X-Men First Class? And I said sure, and I can't remember what I said or which way the conversation went, but we talked for an hour or two and then at the end of it he said you know, I don't think you should be working for another director, I think you should be directing. And I was directing, you know, cinematics and things like that. And he said I can't get you on a big movie because the first time director is not going to fly. But there's this thing called Deadpool. And I said, oh yeah, well, I read the leaked script and it was amazing. The script was amazing. And so then I met with Laurence Shuler Donner and I met with Ryan and then I did a test the test that famously leaked and we did a budget and sadly, drew left like a few months before we got to the point where they say make the movie or not make the movie. Had he stayed we might've made it then because he was very savvy executive.
Tim Miller:But we got to that point where we had a budget and we had a plan and we had that test and Fox just said, no, we don't see it, we don't want to do it. And then everybody walks away quickly, right, the boss doesn't want to do it, and then nobody's interested anymore. You had your moment and you lost, which is terrible, because I would go look at the figures, look how many comic books Deadpool sells, and look at this and look, he sells action figures and he's really popular. And I would write every month and Tom or Jim Giannopoulos would write back to me and say, tim, we love your enthusiasm, but no, thank you. But we never stopped, and Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers, and Jonathan Comac Martin, who was Ryan's producing partner, we never gave up. I asked Jim Cameron to write a letter and he wrote a letter and we got to do a PG-13 draft and then David Fincher called Jim Gianopolis and said you know, tim's would make a great film and give him a shot. And you know we would try all these things, the four of us together.
Tim Miller:And then three things happened the test leaked. And number one the internet went crazy. And then, number two Rhett and Paul got Simon Kinberg on board. They sent him the script. Simon read it and said this is great, I'll help push it. And he was the gatekeeper for all the Fox stuff. And then Emma Watts really saw that R-rated comic book movies are a business opportunity. It's a place in the market where Marvel, disney, marvel and Warner Brothers were unlikely to follow. They ultimately did, of course, but at that time-.
Jennifer Coronado:It was a long journey to that though. Yeah, it was a long journey and off we went. Well, yeah, and then you're directing a movie and you directed cinematics. But directing a big budget film for a studio different thing.
Tim Miller:How did?
Jennifer Coronado:you approach that? Who were your partners? Who helped you set that up for yourself? Because it's a learning experience. You have your confidence, obviously, but how do you approach that and also still run your company at the same time, Tim?
Tim Miller:Blur was at a place where we had a lot of really great people who could step in and cover for me In fact. Fact, the company did better. After I went to to direct deadpool, we made more money the year I left it in any year, which should tell you something. But but I, but honestly, I think this is the key and I give this advice to everyone. And jeff fowler, who's on his third sonic movie I hired him out of college so he was was you can't pretend right.
Tim Miller:When I directed Deadpool, I was 50. And there was a lot of stuff I don't know. I still don't know, but I had the confidence to say I don't know this, help me. And that is incredibly useful. People are happy to help you, and so I said listen, I have a vision for this, but I don't know how to get it there. I don't know how to do it. You guys all know my job and yours better than me, so please help me, and everybody helps you get there, and so it's a really great experience for everybody.
Tim Miller:I think I mean, it was certainly a great experience for me, and if you pretend that you know, or you try and be that person that is afraid to show that they don't know, then the people know you don't know and they just talk shit behind your back and you don't get the benefit of their help. As a director, you accrue this ridiculous amount of credit for anything, whereas it really should be dispersed among the whole crew. So there was no downside to me. I never felt like my authority was threatened or people were working against me. I think just admitting that you don't know everything means that people can feel comfortable about helping you.
Jennifer Coronado:I've heard you say you even asked your script supervisor. What can I do better?
Tim Miller:Oh yeah.
Jennifer Coronado:I think it just shows that you see that it's collaboration right.
Tim Miller:Her answer is it's always been a she on all my movies, different she's, but her answer is always you shoot too many wide masters. Um, but I can't seem to, I can't seem to break that habit, because that's kind of where I find. You know, do you say this line as you're walking up to the table or do you walk down and then say the line, because once you shoot that wide master, you're locked into that, whatever you did and and then cause, then you go in tight, right. But you know, then when you get into the close coverage, if the guy says the line when he's sitting down, well, he's got to do that from now on. And famously, actors don't really start acting in earnest until you go into the medium close-ups right.
Tim Miller:And so, anyway, that's where I kind of work it out and I only have one directing. I'm not even going to say it's a style, I'm just trying to do what people would do. What would people do in this situation? And you, what would? What would people do in this situation? And you could go. What would people do if they were afflicted by cancer but also superheroes? What would they do? Because you want to, I want it to feel grounded and realistic. I don't want it to feel like some heightened reality.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, you've said before also that you know your everyday life skills help contribute to making you a director right, and that seems to be part of that, like your, your life experience and what you do every day right If you say so, but what do you think I meant by that? I think what you mean is that if you have to be a human walking around in the world, don't stop being a human when you're directing. Because you have to connect with people, you have to understand where they're coming from.
Tim Miller:Because you have a group of people, you have to guide towards something, and if you don't recognize that, I want people to like the process and like me and like working with me because I feel like that you get the better out of them. Some people prefer fear, preferred fear. I just never thought that worked well. I may have meant you know I do. I am a keen observer of people and I'm always trying to figure out what motivates them or why they do what they do.
Tim Miller:We had another guy here who was a director and he really was kind of a loner. And he really was kind of a loner. He was not unfriendly or anything like that. He thought a lot, he was very technical and very innerly focused and he made these beautiful short films. But he said you know, I want to do bigger films, I want to be Steven Spielberg. And I said you have to like people and watch people and understand people and engage with them. And your methodology and the films you make are really like what can I do on my own as a filmmaker? Because that's what you want to do, what you want, you want to do it your way and you want to do as much of it as possible yourself. And I said that's not a way to make those kinds of movies. You can make really beautiful films, but you can't make Steven Spielberg's type of films which are really all about the humanity of it. But people don't want to hear things like that. He got angry.
Jennifer Coronado:Honestly, tim, that's so deeply perceptive because different people hear things differently. If you really want to understand people and managing people and mentoring people, you have to understand how they hear things too. Right, and so you were just trying to say you have to listen. You know, and that's an important part of the target that you have your target can be different, you know.
Tim Miller:Yeah, and I was also saying look, play to your strengths. You know you're frustrated. In my opinion, I mean, nobody has to listen. This is just me offering.
Tim Miller:I was talking to another director here who you know we had had some, some.
Tim Miller:There was like a little simmering thing for for a while and, and you know I, we finally broke through and I I said, look, you feel like because I come from a story place where it's all about reading and books and all, and I'm always talking about story and character, and he is more of a visualist. Don't feel like I'm judging you because you don't read as much as I do, because you can do these incredible shots that on my fucking best day I couldn't come up with those and they're different styles of directing and you do that great. If you're going to direct, we'll get you a great story person to support you. If I'm going to direct, I need a great camera operator and a great DP to help me, because those aren't my strengths and that's okay. I think you just understanding where your weaknesses are and getting the right people to help you is key. Every director does that, whether they admit it or not. They gather this group of people around them who are like-minded and who fill in their weaknesses.
Jennifer Coronado:Do you see yourself as a mentor when you're telling people these things?
Tim Miller:I don't think of it that way, cause I've I mean, even though I'm old I'm going to be 60 in a couple of months I feel like I'm just trying to help a friend. But mentoring, I think, takes more discipline than I'm willing to give. It's like you know, somebody asked me to be an EP on a film where they had written to me and I'd said hey, I would do it this way and I would suggest this, and once you call this person, they can help you out. And then it got to the point where they said well, can I pay you? Like we'll give you a big chunk it was a sizable chunk of money. We'll give you that to be an EP, and then you can help with this process. And I'm like no, first of all I don't, I don't want the money, but secondly, that obligates me to do it. I'm happy to help somebody and give them some advice, but if somebody gives me money, well then you know that's a whole other level of responsibility. Then I owe something, versus being able to say, yeah, I'm sorry, I got shit to do, I can't, I can't talk to you anymore about it and I don't want the obligation. And I guess that's what mentoring would feel like, but I do by pointing it out.
Tim Miller:Another of the directors here, it was a younger guy. I was, quite frankly, giving him a pretty hard critique and I said listen, man, all this aside, what you're doing is fucking great. And let me show you what I was doing when I was your age and I happened to be like he was like 30, he's like 34 or something. So I pulled up some stuff from the first years of Blur, which, of course, is utter fucking shite, and I'm like this is what I was doing and so proud of it. And look at what you're doing. At the same age. You will destroy me. By the time you get more experience, you're going to be so much better than I was, because you're already a hundred times better than I was at your age. I enjoy that giving them perspective, because this is true.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, well, I got news for you, my friend. That is, mentoring without the the long term obligation of it it's bike size mentor snacks those are sometimes the things that stay with people the longest you know you know who's best at that.
Tim Miller:In fact, I've heard his friends say they're gonna collect it in a book. Sometimes, fincher, they're like little fucking haikus. I was having trouble with deadpool because it was the first live action film and I said, dude, where do I put the camera? I don't understand coverage. And he would write something like I think the only job of a director is to know where to put the camera and for how long. Or another one I really loved. He said film is about the expansion and compression of time.
Jennifer Coronado:Oh, that's beautiful.
Tim Miller:Yeah, and very simple and very true, right.
Jennifer Coronado:Do you think of him as a mentor for you?
Tim Miller:Absolutely. He wouldn't say that when we were doing Heavy Metal and pitching that it took so many meetings I mean I shit you not like a fucking hundred meetings we took to try and sell that project. And when you go to meet with David and this was pre-Deadpool and even now it wouldn't make much difference David's the alpha dog in the fucking room. You know he's the OG and so we would meet with heads of studios and Tom Cruise and I would be there. But they're focused on David. So I get to watch, right, I get to study how he handles the conversations and he's very different than I am smart and poised and calculating, whereas I'm just like bleh, whereas I'm just like. But I still learned a lot by having a seat at the table at the, you know, at the highest level, and watching someone who is a real mastery of understanding the filmmaking process and the business of filmmaking. It's such an education for me.
Jennifer Coronado:I've talked to David before and I've seen him once in an interview where he talked about when he was working on the aliens movie and joel schumacher gave him advice. And the advice that joel schumacher gave him was david, you can't care more than they do and he was talking about the studio yeah, exactly, but david was like I can't, I can't take that advice and I feel like how you guys map together is you care very deeply about the projects you're working on.
Tim Miller:Yeah, you know Julian Clark, who's edited the movies I've made. Julian is is is great. But he says you know, there's two types of directors and his experiences. They're the ones that come in here and there during the editorial process. And then there's the grinders. He's like you're a grinder, I can't even. I can't imagine not giving it everything you have. I can't imagine not caring. And it's not like it's a burden or an onus, it's. I mean, sometimes it is, but mostly you do it because you love it, you know.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, do you ever protect yourself a little bit from the care? Because sometimes when you care so much it can be hurtful when a project doesn't go the way you want it to, and I know in this business that happens all the time.
Tim Miller:Right, I'm pretty good about that. I mean, when it finally comes time to lose, I'll fight tooth and nail when I feel like I have a chance, but when the bell rings and the round is over, I'm pretty good about walking away. Even with Jim Cameron and I famously fought on Terminator, which is the thing that will bond us past that experience, which Jim says look, it's two creative people who had a difference of opinion, but he loves the movie. We both love sci-fi and fantasy, we're both nerds, and that's a bond that you can get away with a few disagreements.
Jennifer Coronado:I know that you're a big Joe Abercrombie fan. Yes, and you have. So what's the book of his that you're going to make into a movie? What is, and you have, you have. So what's the book of his that you're going to make into a movie? What?
Tim Miller:is it? Which one are you? What are you targeting? Well, I want to make them all. I can spend the rest of my career making joe's books. All of them are good, every single one. If you were going to read them, I would start at the beginning. Best serve cold is the fourth book, about a mercenary general who grows too powerful and so her boss tries to kill her, and it's Kill Bill meets Game of Thrones. And I can't say when it will be made, because you know how Hollywood works. The strikes were not helpful to the process and I can't tell you when we're going to get that momentum back again. But I can say this I will make that fucking film, I will. I will not, I will not fail Like the goon. I will make the goon someday.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, I love it.
Tim Miller:Nothing has ever been easy. You know, heavy Metal was years and hundreds of meetings. Deadpool was years and hundreds of meetings. First Law, joe Abercrombie's stuff has been, even though that one was announced late, it was after years of working with Joe, and we work on a lot of other things together too. He's my favorite person on the planet.
Jennifer Coronado:What does creativity and imagination mean to you?
Tim Miller:Creativity is finding an innovative way to do something that's been done in the past to solve a problem or I guess a story problem is not a problem, but what's the best solution here? I think that's being creative. How do I make this come together in a new and interesting way? Imagination is just the process that you go through to get there. Everybody has their own tricks for these sorts of things, but you said at the beginning it was about the creative process and I found this trick that worked extremely well for me for years and still does. Maybe it won't work for other people, but I tell all the directors here and so I'll share it, which is sometimes other people, but I tell all the directors here and so I'll share it, which is sometimes you have a problem like a creative problem to solve, like I have to come up with an idea for a commercial, or I have to come up with an idea for a video game story or scene. I found it super useful to you have this idea in your mind of the problem that you're trying to solve, like I'll use an example like a Batman movie or a commercial that the client said I want to see a Batman commercial where Batman doesn't throw a punch and I said, okay, well, what would that be? And he's like I don't know, man, you're the creative guy. So you have an idea about. Are we going to do a Batman commercial? It has to be different and that's in your head.
Tim Miller:And then I find books on annuals, on photography or illustration, where every page is a new image. It might be a museum exhibition catalog or whatever, but every page is different. And that idea is floating there in the back of my head and the visual input is coming in differently every time and for some reason those two things come together in my subconscious and I'll come out of you know an hour of doing that and I'll have two or three ideas. What if it's? We see Batman growing up in closeups through throughout his life and he's always being punched or put down or abused, and then he decides to fight back right at the end Wow.
Tim Miller:But whatever you come up with a bunch of different little ideas that then you can expand upon. But it's that blank canvas moment that's hard to get past and that is very helpful, I find.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, Tim, I know you don't think you're a mentor, but I felt mentored by this conversation.
Tim Miller:Well, tim, I know you don't think you're a mentor, but I felt mentored by this conversation. Well, hold on a second. You do this with everybody. What's the single best piece of advice, or two, that you've learned from creative people? Where somebody said this is what I do, or this is the way I think, or this is the way I view the world.
Jennifer Coronado:One of the ones I did was with one of my very close friends, and he's a refugee and LGBTQ. You know he's born in Iran, and one of the things that he said and I think this resonated with Aaron as well, our producer is that goals, not plans, because your plans are going to have to change all the time.
Tim Miller:That's a good one. Yeah, I use the no plan. Survives contact with the enemy.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, that's great.
Tim Miller:I read a really great book called from Andy Dukes, who is a psychologist and a poker player and I'm not a poker player. I think it's called Thinking in Bets. But one of the things in one chapter went over goals and they've studied the fact that you know most people go I'm going to imagine a goal and how I would get there and I'm going to imagine the steps I need to take to get from here to there. But they actually have a higher rate of success if they imagine themselves at that goal and failing and they look backwards and say what didn't I do? That led to me failing at my goal. What didn't I plan for? That led to this moment. It's just like looking at something from the other side and it actually, for whatever reason I don't know how it works inside the brain but it motivated them in a way that was more effective than thinking about your success.
Jennifer Coronado:That's really interesting. I wonder if that's all tied to like fight or flight and what really programs humans to be motivated, because sometimes we gravitate towards how do we get away from the disaster versus what is the success.
Tim Miller:It's because the disaster has such a high penalty. I read a lot. I'm really interested in nonfiction too, but when you think about there was, I can a lot. I'm really interested in nonfiction too, but when you think about there was, I can't remember what I was reading. But when you think, okay, you're a primitive man on the plane and you're walking to the water hole and you hear a rustling in the bushes, just like we're all prone to look at negative news and clickbait that has the negative headlines. Clickbait that has the negative headlines, that rustling in the in the tall grass. Everybody looks right and you go. Well, fuck, 99 times out of 100. It's nothing but evolutionary. Cost of looking every time is nothing compared to not looking the one time that it's a lion. So evolution has kind of programmed you to. That's cheap. Fear is cheap compared to being eaten and not a very effective strategy for your genes. I love those little psychological things. Andy Duke's book is really great, but I have all the Malcolm Gladwell books.
Jennifer Coronado:Do you listen to his podcast?
Tim Miller:No, I don't, but I always listen to his books on tape and anybody who wants to read joe abercrombie's books I highly recommend listening to them, because the gentleman that reads them, steven pacey, is amazing. I've listened to all of his books like and there's 12 of them I've listened to all like eight times through.
Tim Miller:It's fucking crazy. But anyway, annie dukes has this chapter where she talks about people they're even pros at playing poker where they'll get inordinately influenced by winning or by losing. And she said you listen to people in the tournament, what's going on? You might hear somebody getting a little louder in anger or joy and she calls it they're in tilt. And she calls it they're in tilt, which means that their emotions have started to overwhelm the logic and strategy of the game. And you don't make good decisions when you're in tilt, which you know. Anybody that's ever walked away from an argument has realized that, fuck, it was probably smart to walk away because I would have said some things that were not smart.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, it's so interesting you say that because this digital world that we live in now, like online social media, all that, it kind of emphasizes the tilt right.
Tim Miller:Yeah, you constantly want to react, react, react, react, react, and it has the double whammy of being anonymous most of the time. I've never had a social media account, nor will I ever, because, a I don't think anybody wants to know my opinion and, b I don't want to get caught up in that. You know, I don't want to get caught up in that world of trying to prove I'm right or prove someone else is wrong.
Jennifer Coronado:It's just such a waste of time. I mean, there's something you've said about debating. I love a good debate. My husband my maiden name was Van Riemsdyk and my husband likes to call it I'm Van Riemsdyking because I will be debating and my family will get together and have big debates over things that we're all fundamentally agreeing on, but we've had to find some angle where we disagree on it in some way, shape or form.
Tim Miller:Well, america seems to be in that frame of mind where we haven't learned, we've unlearned the process of healthy debates, but I still, I still like it. You know one of the authors, john Scalzi, who written a lot of Love, death and Robots. He lives in Ohio. He doesn't necessarily believe what a lot of his neighbors do, but they're his neighbors and their kids are friends of his kids and it creates a different sort of world that you don't get online. One of the big things about Zoom and the new work world, which a lot of people like I do not. I miss having the artists around all the time. I miss those casual conversations that happen in the kitchen while you're getting coffee. Those are the things that make you relate to people and feel close. I would have a hard time firing someone who I saw every day and who I ate lunch with every day, much harder than someone who was just a face on.
Jennifer Coronado:Zoom.
Tim Miller:That's just monkey brain shit, but it's true, and especially for our industry. It saddens me because I felt when I got into this business it was this exclusive club and I felt like this you know, I'd been led into the temple to learn its mysteries and all these other people were around me. You're not going to make an appointment to ask somebody a question. It's tough. I don't think it's tenable. Maybe that sounds a little anachronistic and we'll just find a different way of doing it. But you know, if I had to spend the first three years of my time in this business working at my mom's house instead of at a studio around other people, I think it would have been a very different experience.
Jennifer Coronado:And also there's something there's. People can be a pain, but they can also be fun and, like you, can laugh about things and it's organic. One of my pet peeves is being in a call and it's like, all right, let me click the digital, raise my hand and you wait to get called on.
Tim Miller:That's not the way we were made. I'm hoping that it doesn't last.
Jennifer Coronado:I do think that we have found that, like people come back more when they actually run into people that they know and they're like oh, oh, yeah, you, I like you, you know, yeah, it's a messy. It's a messy business right now, man.
Tim Miller:It is, and who knows where it will be.
Jennifer Coronado:That's the mess of it, right.
Tim Miller:Or the joy of it. I do know one thing I think where Blur is trying to go is creating more of our own content, which everybody will say. But I think that there's so much churn in the studio system and so much fear that I really feel like the way to get things done is to find things that are great and to find the money to make it outside the studio system, so you're not beholden to an executive that may not want to stick their neck out or they may change jobs next week. There's so many reasons to say no when you're inside the studio system. If I can make a movie for $50 million, I might be able to find that and then sell it to them. They need the content, but they're afraid to make it.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, it has to be less their risk, I think. And I think probably one of their biggest challenges watching the market is everybody wants the studios to be tech companies, but they're not and they're not going to make that revenue, and so the market punishes them for that.
Tim Miller:Yeah, and why can't we just be satisfied with a reasonable return on our investment?
Jennifer Coronado:I totally agree. There's a finite amount of growth that you get in any industry, because you run out of people eventually.
Tim Miller:It was interesting when somebody finally explained sort of the logic behind the tentpole trend, like why do they only do tentpoles? And when you look at the math you go okay. Well, because no amount of small movies is going to make enough money and you have to do the tentpoles and even if some of them fail, the ones that succeed make far more money than any number of low and mid-budget, unless you get some kind of you know lottery ticket one, like some of the smaller horror movies that are made for, or deadpool for that matter. But you know what? What was successful about deadpool in part was that I made it for what was a fairly reasonable budget.
Tim Miller:I've been supremely lucky in my life. There is not a luckier nerd on the planet, and I include my failures in that, you know, because if you win all the time, that doesn't make you a good person, or I don't consider myself a good person, but it doesn't make you an interesting person and it doesn't teach you anything. So I don't regret my failures either. I'm not. I'm never the smartest person in the room, and I've come to accept that when you work with guys like Fincher and Cameron, you just go fuck it. I'm never going to be that good and that's okay, better than most people.
Jennifer Coronado:Well, that's because you're a creative, so thank you for sharing your time with us today.
Tim Miller:Thank you very much.
Jennifer Coronado:Thank you for listening to Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a slightly disappointed productions production dropping every other Thursday. Wherever podcasts are available, make sure to rate and review, and maybe even like and subscribe. Thank you for listening.
