A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer

breath was never the same.
    She said that the unpredictability was almost worse than whatever was done to her: How long am I going to be able to breathe? How long am I going to have to hold my breath, and can I hold my breath that long?
    It’s one thing to hear about human cruelty on the news, or to read about it. But to walk alongside Veronica de Negri and hear what other human beings had done to her is an experience unlike any I had ever had before.
    How does a person do that to another person?
    Where does the strength come from to survive?
    It takes enormous courage just to be able to retell that story to a stranger—to relive what was done, and also to absorb the reaction of the person hearing the story.
    I was completely mesmerized by Veronica because of that courage, and also because of her self-possession and her dignity. Her refusal to be silent. She opened to me a world I would never have been aware of, and a whole set of human qualities and behaviors I would never have thought about.
    Veronica de Negri gave me something critical in addition to the searing details of her story. She gave me a completely new sense of human resilience.
    One of the concepts that really animates me is what I think of as “mastery.” I want to know what it takes to really master something—not just to be a police officer, but to be the chief; not just to be an intelligence agent, but to be head of the CIA; not just to be a trial attorney, but to be F. Lee Bailey. That’s a quiet thread through my curiosity, and it’s also a theme in some form of every one of my movies. The stories touch the whole range of human experience, I hope, but the central struggle is often about achievement, or the struggle for achievement. What does success look like, what does success feel like, to a father or the president of the United States, a rap musician or a mathematician?
    Veronica de Negri really shattered the question of “mastery” for me. Of anyone I have ever met, she faced the most fearsome and enormous personal challenge. But it was also the most basic. She wasn’t trying to solve a math equation. She was trying to survive. She was trying to survive in the face of smart, evil people who wanted to destroy her.
    For Veronica, there was no help. There was no rescue. Shewas up against the most horrifying opponent—well-armed fellow human beings. The stakes were total: her sanity and her physical survival. And the only person she could turn to was herself. She had to search inside herself for the skills she needed to withstand what was done to her. Nothing else was available—not even a view of what she was facing beyond the blindfold.
    I met and talked to Veronica several times after that first meeting at Sting’s house. Over time, what I came to understand was that she had found a capacity inside herself that most of us never go looking for, let alone have to depend on.
    The only way to persevere is to have the capacity to calmly separate yourself from what is being done to you.
    Veronica figured out that to withstand being tortured, she had to take herself out of the reality of what was being done to her. You slow your brain down, you slow yourself down. People talk about being in “flow,” when they’re writing, when they’re surfing or rock-climbing or running, when they’re lost in doing something completely absorbing.
    What Veronica told me is that to survive being tortured, hour after hour, every day for eight months, she had to get into a state of flow as well, but a flow state of an alternate reality, that has its own narrative. That’s how she survived. She couldn’t control the physical world, but she could control her psychological reaction to it.
    It’s a mechanism, and it’s how she saved herself. In fact, it’s a storytelling mechanism. You have to find a different story to tell yourself to take you out of the torture.
    Veronica’sstory is so