everything in that movie came from a real world down to the dog.

I think I became less dogmatic about truth and more interested in what people need emotionally to survive.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about, and working on.

On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of design matters, we'll hear from

some of the directors that Debbie has interviewed over the years. We were saying the same things.

We were saying the same lyrics at the same time. What's the next thing that I want to do? Boy,

this seems hard to do. How do it? I felt huge responsibility to get it right.

Theater, movies, television, different mediums, yet they all require a director.

Directors are the people at the center of an intense collaboration of writers,

actors, designers, and technicians.

In recent years, I've had the opportunity to speak with some of the great directors working

today, and I'd like to play some excerpts from a few of those interviews.

Brian Copleman has produced albums and written and directed movies and television shows.

When I spoke with him in 2017, he was the showrunner for the TV show Billions, which he also co-created.

I read that you were really impacted by how the Cohen brothers in Spike Lee captured a new kind of language, what you referred to as both spoken and visual. And then years later, when you saw Pulp Fiction, opening night was to you, the way people talk about seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. That's completely true. So talk about that moment. Well, that was college. Yeah, I was in college. Well, so Spike Lee, his movie, She's Got a Hab It, and the Cohn Brothers Raising Arizona came out within a few months on one another. And I remember going to see She's Got a Have It. I'd never heard of Spike because it was his first movie. That movie destroyed me.

Yeah.

I couldn't handle it. First of all, it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life. And then also, it mattered so much. Yeah. The visual style and the sense of humor of it and what it was about kill me. I went back three nights in a row. I brought each night I brought more friends to see the film. And I memorized it. And then soon thereafter, I went to see Raising Arizona and did the same thing.

And that kind of planted a sea. I brought more friends to see the film. And I memorized it. And then soon thereafter, I went to see Raising Arizona and did the same thing.

And that kind of planted a seed, right?

I didn't do this work for 11 years after that until we wrote our first movie.

But that's when I realized there's this language in both a visual and a verbal language. And people can use language in film in this very specific way.

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