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Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat and this is “Interesting Times.”
American pop culture is in trouble. The Hollywood dream factory has gone stagnant, recycling the same stories time and time again. Giants like Marvel seem too big to fail, but they’ve lost the ability to tell us new and surprising stories — with one notable exception.
The “Star Wars” serial “Andor” has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise, pleasing obsessive fans and critics alike. Part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world, without feeling at all like tedious propaganda.
My guest today is the showrunner behind “Andor,” Tony Gilroy. We’re going to talk about how exactly he made “Star Wars” great again, how art and politics interact in a show about radicals trying to defeat fascism, and whether Hollywood can tell stories for grown-ups again.
So, Tony Gilroy, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Tony Gilroy: Thank you for having me.
Douthat: I want to start by congratulating you on what I personally think a large number of critics and a sizable fraction of the viewing public consider the most successful “Star Wars” production, maybe since the original trilogy.
Gilroy: Thank you. There’s a lot of material to be compared with, so it’s a big thank you.
Douthat: So you’ve been frank in the past about not having been an intense “Star Wars” guy before you got pulled into this universe and into this work and this project. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that’s like — coming into a story, a franchise. When you looked around the world of not just “Star Wars” but all of the endless franchise worlds that dominate Hollywood right now, were you saying to yourself: I’m going to do something inside a franchise that no one has done before? Or were you saying ——
Gilroy: Sure, definitely.
Douthat: Look, there are other models here of how, like, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, or something like that?
Gilroy: No, I’m always trying to do something that I haven’t seen before that is going to be unusual. So, no, I was very much not into any other model. I was very into striking new ground.
And the other thing that I was being offered was a five-year piece of history on that calendar that you probably know pretty well — I think you’re a big fan. I have that five-year tranche of history that takes you up to the first scene in “Rogue One.”
Douthat: Right. For listeners and viewers who are not huge “Star Wars” fans, the story that “Andor” tells is the story of the rise of the Rebel Alliance. How you get to the point in the original “Star Wars” where Luke Skywalker comes in and there’s already this rebellion ongoing against the Empire. And you’re telling a very, very political story.
Gilroy: Well, that was the offer. The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity to use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I’d done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again.
When are you going to be able to have, as we’ve ended up with, a 1,500-page novel — I think of it as a novel, really — that is trying to deal with as many aspects of authoritarianism and fascism and colonialism and rebellion and coalition and sacrifice and all of that?
Douthat: I think this is a good place to pivot more to a discussion of politics and art, because “Andor,” it’s telling a political story in a way that goes beyond anything “Star Wars” has done before. It’s not just the world of the Skywalker family and the Jedi knights. It’s a world of bureaucrats and senators, politicians and so on. So talk a little bit about: What is this world that you’re showing? What is the political world that you’re depicting in this show?
Gilroy: The five years that I have been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The emperor is building the Death Star.
They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically.
There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.
The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over.
And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously, who wouldn’t even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There is a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.
At the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true end of the true victory of the Rebel Alliance.
I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make a revolution like this happen — on both sides — and I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion. I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that, when it’s done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice and consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately consumes its own proponents.
I was just reading about the last days of Mussolini a month ago. And it’s like right out of that — people get lost and get hung out to dry. So I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who’ve cast their lot with the empire, who get burned by it all.
Douthat: Is “Andor” a left-wing show? Because this is something that I’ve said a couple of times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example, as a conservative columnist, of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I’ve had friends, especially on the right, come back to me and say: Oh, you know what, it’s not left wing or right wing; it’s just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you’ve made a left-wing work of art. What do you think?
Gilroy: I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never ——
Douthat: [Scoffs.]
Gilroy: I mean, I never do. I don’t ——
Douthat: But it’s a story, but it’s a political story about revolutionary ——
Gilroy: Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?
Douthat: No, I don’t. But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism. I see the Empire as you just described it: It’s presented as a fascist institution that doesn’t have any sort of communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It’s fascist and authoritarian. And you’re meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of that, right?
Gilroy: Yeah.
Douthat: So you talk about all this history that you brought in. Talk about that a little bit.
Gilroy: My education is very, very spotty. I’m not a college graduate but completely autodidactic. I grew up in a house with an amazing library, and I’ve been a very active, active reader my whole life.
And I’ve done just an incredible number of deep dives in my life where I’ve become obsessed with all kinds of different things and I’ve made my own syllabus. I probably read Stefan Zweig’s “Marie Antoinette” when I was 15 or 16 years old and started a French Revolution jag, and then probably revisited the French Revolution half a dozen times in my life. And probably the last thing I read was — it’s the great novel Hilary Mantel’s “A Place of Greater Safety.”
Douthat: Oh, yeah, it’s a terrific book.
Gilroy: An amazing book. So I’ve done that. And I was obsessed with the Russian Revolution, and then the literature on that has expanded over time and the show trials. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen “The House of Government” — it’s just an incredible book.
And different times, different things would come out. Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, the Roman revolutions. My syllabus for the show just goes back too far and too deep. It’s just something I’ve always been fascinated in.
I don’t think of the show as a left-wing show. And I don’t want you to think that I came on the show — I said before, I saw the opportunity to use all this material and to dig into all these things, but that is not how I write. It’s completely antithetical to the way I write. I write very, very small. I trust my instincts are going to take me someplace larger if I’m doing it right, but it’s really almost exclusively all about character. I plot through dialogue. I go very, very deep. And you can see how many characters I have and how many I’m carrying, and I don’t think of it as pushing or promoting or anything.
Douthat: But in the end, I guess, here’s how I think about it.
Gilroy: Go ahead.
Douthat: So this is a show — it’s a story — where you are rooting for revolutionaries against a fascist regime, right?
Gilroy: OK. All right, all right.
Douthat: As you said, you’re not rooting for the Empire in the end, right?
Gilroy: No, no, no.
Douthat: That to me is the political foundation of the work. And that’s why I use the term “left wing” — not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you’re telling a story in which basically you’re on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries.
At the same time — and this is why I think it is effective art — what I think you’ve been able to do, maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading, is give people a window into why the radicals, even if you’re rooting for them, you can see how things can go wrong. But that is what I really like about the show’s approach to politics, is that it’s ——
Gilroy: But what’s fascinating is, particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of using Stellan Skarsgard’s character, Luthen, and Forest Whitaker’s character as the original gangsters, and the difficulty of integrating the inceptors of radicalism into a coalition.
But there’s never anybody, I don’t think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than: Please leave us alone. Stop killing us. Stop destroying our communities. Don’t build the Death Star and kill us.
I never have a character, I don’t think, stand up and say: This is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.
Douthat: That’s fair. That is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying: This is ultimately a show about localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny.
But talk a little bit about how you portray the people who serve the Empire, though.
Gilroy: I’m with everybody on the show. Truly — without sounding like a T-shirt or a cliché — I have to live through every single one of them to do it properly. I have to really feel for every single person in the show. And there’s no shortcut to that other than to empathetically dive into every person’s point of view and every person’s insecurities. I’m as invested in Partagaz and Dedra Meero and Syril as any of the other characters on the show. I mean ——
Douthat: These are the characters who are imperial in various ways ——
Gilroy: The Gestapo — say they’re Gestapo.
I don’t have the luxury — that sounds so glib — I just don’t have any other way to work other than to fully be with everybody that I’m writing for and taking care of. And then as a dramatist, I also have actual human beings who are doing this that are vivid and alive for me. So your empathetic response to the character is also, as an element of transference, to the people that are playing the parts. I don’t know any other way to do it.
But to go back to your last point, before we move on from it: I think if there’s any ideology in the show at all that is expressed, that seems consistent through the whole thing — and I don’t know where it lines up; I think it would probably be just as confusing for you to try to make a left-right marker on it. But I feel the disruption of community, and the destruction of community — whether it’s on a large scale with colonialism, if it’s on a small scale with a city, in a town or a family — the Empire in the show is consuming and destroying communities everywhere. And the concept of community is the universal flag that I think I can fly all the way through the whole show and feel comfortable with.
Douthat: To me, what you’ve just described — the mentality of always trying to see the world through each character’s eyes, even when they’re on opposing sides, even when they represent a community-destroying perspective that you yourself are against — is the key to doing successful art about politics.
But it seems tremendously hard for people to do. When I think about most art that tries to capture American politics, certainly, but also any kind of politics that gets close to the present moment, there’s a conspicuous failure of empathy for anyone who’s not on the same side as the screenwriter, the novelist, the filmmaker, and so on. That’s my sense of things. And again, it’s one reason that I appreciate “Andor.”
In terms of modern cinema or modern TV, do you think there are other shows and movies that tackle politics that you admire, that you think pull this off, this kind of cross-political empathy?
Gilroy: I don’t know if I want to answer that by giving a list of shows. Maybe I’ll — I’m going to push deeper on that.
Douthat: That’s even better. Please push deeper.
Gilroy: I’m going to push deeper on that.
You know, I had to study up a little bit to come on a podcast like this, for an interview like this ——
Douthat: It’s a very serious podcast. [Chuckles.]
Gilroy: I mean, the bar is higher. Seriously, man. This is a trickier conversation than most of the ones I have to have on this. I listened to the podcast that you did with the — I don’t know the gentleman’s name. The one who’s trying to revive the vibe shift into the ——
Douthat: Jonathan Keeperman.
Gilroy: Right wing. Yeah.
Douthat: Right-wing publisher. Yep.
Gilroy: You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?
Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.
That is what actors do: I’m going on Broadway, I’m playing a villain for six months. I got to live in that. I’m playing the slave, I’m playing the fisherman, I’m playing the nurse, I’m the murderer — you have to get in there. You have to live lives through other people. I think that the simple act of that transformation and that process automatically gives you what I would describe as a more generous and progressive point of view. It just has to.
And I don’t see how you can buy, if you’re going to reissue the Hardy Boys or try to twist a knot and say that Melville or the Coen brothers made a piece of right-wing art because you see something in there — I think it really misses the larger point of the struggle that that movement is going to be up against. Does that make any sense to you?
Douthat: Yeah, I think that that is the view of many, if not most people who work in the arts that I’ve had sustained conversations with about politics, and why art tends to be liberal or progressive-coded and so on.
Just to speak up on behalf of the conservative critique, I think you could say a couple of things. One is that liberalism and progressivism itself, in 21st-century America, is a power structure, a set of assumptions, views about who’s good, who’s bad. It passes a certain kind of judgment on the past that can be antithetical to serious art. And that you get a lot of progressivism where it’s like: The moral arc of the universe is always bending in a particular direction and everyone in the past who had different views is benighted and wrong and so on. And that that is its own failure of empathy and understanding, and one that progressives are particularly prone to.
Gilroy: So the empathy for events is what you’re saying?
Douthat: No, the empathy for people who existed, who had views that contemporary progressives now considered benighted, for instance. Empathy ——
Gilroy: But I’m trying to make a deeper point. You’re asking me why I’m saying just the act of the job, just the act of the day-to-day work — it doesn’t matter, the ideology, and there may be exceptions across the spectrum — but in general, the act of pretending to be someone else — many actors don’t like to use the word “pretending,” and writers don’t like to use the word “pretending” — but the act of inhabiting or becoming someone else, in any iteration, in any historical setting, just that simple transformation and the work that goes into that, until the point where you can access it immediately, that act … [chuckles]. I’m very eager to put it in a religious context for you, because I know what a strong flavor that is on this show; it’s perhaps not religious, but it is an act of transformation that is more than a magic trick.
Douthat: Right.
Gilroy: It doesn’t necessarily put you in an ideological — it doesn’t cast your vote — but it does open your mind in a way that forces you to think twice about the person who’s sitting next to you on the bus.
Douthat: Right. And what I’m trying to suggest is that some people do it better than others. Some artists do it better than others.
Gilroy: Yes, sure.
Douthat: But there is also a pattern where art that is made in an environment where people share a particular worldview fails the test you’re setting it. The test of empathy is often when it’s confronting people who hold views or represent ideas or institutions or anything else that contemporary progressives don’t favor.
So just to give you an example — again, you don’t have to agree with this, because you don’t have to criticize any of your colleagues in the business — but if you go back and watch a movie like “The Shape of Water,” Guillermo del Toro’s movie that won best picture at the beginning of what we now think of as the Great Awokening — in a way, it’s a very empathetic movie. It’s a movie about how a band of outsiders — minorities, nonhumans and so on — band together to defeat an evil authoritarian figure. But the evil authoritarian figure is supposed to be like the evil representative of white Christian McCarthyite masculinity.
Michael Shannon does, in a way, a very good job portraying the role. But as I sit there watching the movie, it’s a movie that absolutely has no empathy for anyone outside its circle of virtuous outsiders. It has no sense of what it would actually be like to be a ——
Gilroy: I don’t want to defend that picture.
Douthat: OK. Good.
Gilroy: I don’t think it’s a subtle picture, and I think it’s doing what ——
I mean, what’ll I come back with? Let’s talk about “In the Heat of the Night.”
Douthat: Well, let me ——
Gilroy: No, let’s talk about “In the Heat of the Night” for one second. The Rod Steiger character, the Southern sheriff, couldn’t be more of a cliché as the movie starts, couldn’t be more of a living caricature of what we all expect, and lives on those expectations.
As the movie tracks along, and as some great writing and great directing and great acting gets done, you gradually come to realize that everybody involved in that picture is absolutely as invested in him as they are in Sidney Poitier, and they’re absolutely invested in that character as much as they are in any other character. The whole thing is alive.
The difference between “The Shape of Water” is it wants to be gothic. I’m not sure what Guillermo was going for there — it’s a different kind of movie. But when people really care about it, they get there, I think. I don’t know.
Douthat: I agree with you completely about “In the Heat of the Night.” Let me give you an example from your own work. Which is, I think, the best movie that you made. You’ve directed three movies? How many movies have you directed?
Gilroy: Three movies. Yes.
Douthat: Three movies. They’re all good, to be clear, but the best of them by general consensus is “Michael Clayton.” It’s a movie that stars George Clooney as a lawyer who’s a fixer, who ends up dealing with a case of corporate malfeasance, where a company poisoned, essentially, poisoned a town, poisoned kids. And one of his colleagues essentially has a mental breakdown driven by a crisis of conscience.
This is a movie I love. I love “Michael Clayton.” And I would, again, describe it as kind of a left-wing movie. It’s a movie about evil ——
Gilroy: Why? Why is that?
Douthat: Because the foundation of the movie — and I would say this if you make a movie where the moral foundation of the movie is that the American military is awesome and kicks ass. I might love that movie or I might dislike it, but I’d call that a kind of right-leaning movie. And if you make a movie about how evil corporations are poisoning your children, I call that a left-wing movie.
But what I want to get to is the villain in that movie, who’s played by Tilda Swinton — terrific performance. And to me, you create her — and she creates the character, too — in a way that, again, fulfills the goal of creating a character who you’re rooting against, who’s obviously the bad guy, but who is deeply human, fascinating, bizarre, totally relatable in various ways. And you do it in a way that I think lots of movies that have a political perspective fail at.
That’s all I’m getting at. I think that there is a way in which you can make a movie that has a political point of view that captures the fullness of reality, and it’s hard to do, and you do it well, and not everyone does.
This isn’t even a question. I’m trying to get you ——
Gilroy: I think you have maybe — I know, but ——
[Cross talk]
Gilroy: All right. Well, let me respond to that. I think you might have an opening statement on “Andor,” just because essentially there’s a lot of politics and fascism is identified. But it’s funny, I just saw “Clayton” for the first time in 18 years, the night before last. They had a screening in L.A.
Douthat: Really?
Gilroy: Yeah. They had a show print and we’re out promoting “Andor,” and they tied it in with that. I hadn’t seen it in 18 years. I went to a packed theater just two nights ago and saw it again. So it’s fresh in my mind.
I’m going to really push back against “left-wing” on that picture. I don’t understand at all what is left or right about poisoning people with a pesticide and lying about it. I don’t think anybody on the right wants to be — let’s keep my politics out of it, but I can’t see myself ever, in any iteration of myself, identifying with the corporation that has been fighting a class-action suit for poisoning people. And ——
Douthat: Right. But that’s what ——
Gilroy: Wait. Tilda Swinton’s character is such a lost person. She has to practice being herself. If there’s a political element about the movie at all, it’s Tilda Swinton trying to falsely approximate what she thinks may be male corporate behaviors. You might be able to make an argument about that.
Douthat: Yep.
Gilroy: But who wants to defend pesticides? I don’t think it’s left or right at all. I think it’s about people.
I mean, I think I’m a moralist, if you want to know the truth — the No. 1 definition, not the No. 2 definition. In the end, I think there’s a moral code that I have, and I think that gets expressed a lot. But it’s impossible for me to see “Clayton” as an ideological thing.
Douthat: This is the last thing I’ll say, because I want to ask you a different question about “Michael Clayton.” The last thing I’ll say is ——
Gilroy: But I want to know if you would ——
Douthat: Of course you don’t identify with the corporation that’s using pesticides to poison the children ——
Gilroy: Well, then, what’s your alternative left-right?
Douthat: Let’s say I made a movie. And it was about an English department faculty that was led by an African American lesbian professor that persecuted a virtuous Catholic conservative academic and got him fired. I would feel like I’d made kind of a right-wing movie. But then I could say: Oh, are you on the side of persecuting Catholic intellectuals? No, no one’s on that side. But who you choose as your villains does have political implications. That’s all I’m saying.
So let me ask you a different question about “Michael Clayton.”
Gilroy: OK. Go ahead.
Douthat: Why didn’t you make more movies like “Michael Clayton”? It’s been 18 years. “Duplicity” came out after that, and then you did a Bourne movie. And then you got sucked into the “Star Wars” universe. But I watched that movie, and I was like: I could watch five more movies, 10 more movies like that from Tony Gilroy.
Gilroy: If you look at my complete C.V., it’s pretty chaotic. And you could tell that, to go back to what we said before, I don’t really want to do anything that I’ve done before.
I really wanted to make “Duplicity.” I really had a gas making it. I went from there to “Bourne Legacy.” I’d been with the Bourne franchise for many years, and that’s its own shambolic success. I wanted to give them a Marvel universe, in a way; we really had a way of doing that, but there was just too much bad blood and too much confusion that it didn’t work.
The life of a screenwriter, the life of a writer-director — I have not been able to pick and choose what I’ve wanted to do.
Douthat: And that’s the core of the question. I’m younger than you. I grew up in the 1990s, which meant that for me, as a teenager — someone who was not as crazed about the movies as maybe you were, but who liked them a lot, and they were a big part of my life, hanging out, going to the movies on weekends — I took it for granted then that you would have serious movies for grown-ups, fun, original movies.
You worked on “Devil’s Advocate” — Al Pacino, Keanu — and that was the kind of movie that “going to the movies” meant: You were going to see a big movie star giving you a big speech, playing Satan in a Manhattan high rise.
It was great stuff. And to me, the big change in American pop culture in the last 20 years is that the world that made movies like “Michael Clayton” and “Devil’s Advocate” possible has just gone away. I’m wondering if you agree with that. It just seems incredibly hard ——
Gilroy: You stopped going to the theater. You stopped going to the theater. You — with a capital Y — stopped going to the theater.
Douthat: No, I take that personally, because I do have a lot of kids and I don’t get to the movie theater a lot.
Gilroy: You don’t, and ——
Douthat: So it is my fault, personally.
Gilroy: Totally. [Laughs.]
Ah, man, I’ve been around so long. I’ve seen this whole thing. I’ve seen all these dynastic changes happen and ridden it through. The economics are just what they are. And “Michael Clayton” existed in that moment, where the model on that movie was: If I could get a movie star whose full-freight price was basically the cost of the movie and they do the movie for free, I had a movie. Even at that point, if George is going to come in — I think the movie cost $20 million; I think George was getting $15 million, $20 million at that point — and he waives his fee, he owns the picture, and that’s how that movie gets made.
That model began to degrade over time. And now it’s an impossibility. I mean, now “Clayton” is absolutely a streaming show.
Douthat: Well, there aren’t movie stars anymore.
Gilroy: There are no movie stars anymore, nope. There are no movie stars. And so all of these things have changed.
My father was in the same business. My brothers are in the same business. I have grown up in this my whole life. It’s prenatal for me. And one of the major, most important things carved in stone that I know: It does no good to complain about the weather, man. You got to go out, you got to see what’s there.
My brothers and friends and I grew up with a generation of writers before us — great writers and great producers and directors — and many of them became embittered by the changing landscape and the changing topography of what had happened. That’s a lesson that I’ve taken away. I’m staying flexible. I want to work, I want to be obsessed. I want to work on something that I’m into.
Douthat: What gives you hope right now? Do you think that we are just stuck in a world where you can maybe make something great inside a franchise, but mostly movies for grown-ups are over? Or do you think things are going to get better?
Gilroy: Better? I don’t know. I think there’s a couple of really significant things. I mean, personally, I have a movie that I’m hoping to get greenlit very soon that I’ll go back and direct. It’s about movie music. It’s certainly not “Clayton” in that it’s a thriller, but it’s very much in the same scale, and it’s very ambitious and unusual. And if I get to make it, I think you’d say: Oh, this is the thing I was talking about.
But what’s new and good? I’ll tell you what’s good. What’s good is time. The two major developments I would say are the best developments in recent years are: One is Tony Soprano. Because prior to Tony Soprano, for every writer who ever went into a pitch meeting or ever dealt with an actor, there was always a note: Can we make this character more sympathetic? How do we make Ross more sympathetic? Should we give you a dog?
Douthat: I get those notes from my producers every day.
Gilroy: If you had a dog there, a puppy, it would be a lot better.
After Tony Soprano, people really began to realize something that had already been staring at them, which is that characters need to be fascinating and have to be relatable in some way, but they have to be fascinating more than anything else. And sympathetic wasn’t the characteristic that everybody wanted. I think that’s a huge, tectonic development.
I think the other development that’s probably more significant is time. The ability to tailor the size of the canvas or build a house to the lot and appropriately is an incredibly liberating creative development. That’s transformative: I have a story. Does it really want to fit into three hours? Does it really want to fit into seven hours? Does it really want to be 24 episodes? Is it really just a movie? I think how shows are delivered — I can’t stress how it’s almost as if you added perspective to painting its shadow or something. That’s a really major development.
Now, all that said, all that happiness and “everything is great” — I listened to your A.I. podcast. I was talking to people in L.A. the last couple of days. I’ve heard some just absolutely gothic, dire information or prognostication about A.I.
I, I — [Sigh.] I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know how to think about it. What did you think when you were done with that podcast? Did you want to go out to the parking lot and scream, or what?
Douthat: I didn’t fully believe it. That’s the truth. I don’t think the world’s ending in 2027.
Gilroy: I hope you’re right.
Douthat: You hope I’m right? I hope I’m right, too. We’ll find out.
Gilroy: I hope you’re right, man.
Douthat: To me, the question with A.I. — the great question — is an audience question for your business. If you get an A.I. that can generate 1,500 simulated versions of “Michael Clayton” or “Andor” — and let’s be honest, there’ll be 1,500 simulated versions of a Marvel movie or a “Star Wars” show — and the actors aren’t real and there’s no actual screenwriter behind it, do people want that?
I think that they don’t, in the end. And even if most people who watch “Andor” don’t know who Tony Gilroy is, in the end, they want to think that there is a mind and a human being behind the story, just as they definitely want to think that you’re talking about the work your actors do, that it’s Tilda Swinton and George Clooney playing those characters. Even in an age when movie stars have declined, people don’t want an A.I. simulacrum playing a fictional character.
This may be my total naïveté, but I do think that’s what it comes down to for Hollywood with A.I.: Does the audience accept the substitution of whatever A.I. can do for what you can do? And I’m hopeful that they don’t.
Gilroy: I’ll talk about that for one minute, but I think it’s subsidiary to: Well, maybe people will have nothing else to do, to watch, because they won’t have any jobs and they won’t have anything. Or maybe it’s a Chinese A.I. nuclear race.
It’s so terrifying, I don’t know ——
Douthat: There won’t be a movie business ——
Gilroy: I mean, you find out forensically what you really think when you go out and sell your picture. It’s really an odd thing. And over time I’ve really become more aware, in these kinds of conversations and post facto, what I’ve really been doing. And one of the things I feel I’ve really been doing is, I think human behavior and human insecurities — and all the things that make us chaotic, complicated beings — have always had a corrosive effect on every technology and weapon and everything that’s been thrown in its way. It’s like water. It leaks down and it rusts. It’s managed to wonderfully rust out all of the things that have been thrown at it before.
I don’t know if this is one that we can beat. In your scenario, maybe it’s true: Maybe live theater will become this cultlike thing. Maybe there’ll be some huge, incredible renaissance of return to an acoustic community in every way, shape or form. I don’t know.
But I am not sanguine about the next corner we’re going to turn. We have no frame of reference for that. So absent that, I would try to be optimistic, I suppose.
Douthat: That’s a dark place, Tony. So give me some light, give me some advice right now. Set aside A.I. — just the movie and TV industry that you’re in right now, without the total transformation. Give me advice for the young Tony Gilroy, or the would-be Tony Gilroy, the would-be screenwriter, director, whatever else of 2025. What would you tell them?
Gilroy: Well, I give the same advice. All these people come, and kids come and whatever. Now it’s simple. I just say ——
Douthat: [Laughs.] They’re young. They’re eager to learn.
Gilroy: No, but I mean, have something to say. People can’t be doing this job because they think it’s cool or the money’s good or whatever. There’s no point in this if you don’t have something to say.
The optimistic other thing is: What do people talk about everywhere? They talk about: What are you watching? What are you seeing? Did you see this? What episode are you on? The amount of narrative that is being consumed and the leisure time liberation and the accelerated delivery systems that can bring it to you — I mean, narrative is an essential food group to the human experience, and it has never not been thus. Will that go away because it’s a machine doing it? I don’t know. How will machines do it? Will they do it better? Will people accept that? I have no idea, but man ——
Douthat: We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Gilroy: I mean, one of the things I always say is, tell your story as if it’s a campfire story. The best writers are people that could sit down — I could sit down and I really think confidently, with a little bit of lead time and a vodka in my hand at a campfire, I can hold your attention. I can really hold your attention. That’s really valuable. That never ends. That seems to be proven.
Douthat: Good. Well, then, if the A.I. 2027 scenario’s real, we’ll agree to meet up around the campfire in the postapocalyptic ruins, and you can tell me a story, Tony.
Gilroy: You bring the bottle.
Douthat: Thank you so much.
Gilroy: A pleasure.
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This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos, Elisa Gutierrez and Katherine Sullivan. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Elliot deBruyn, Marina King and Derek Knowles. Video editing by Arpita Aneja, Dani Dillon and Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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