A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer Page A

compelling that we tried to capture it in a movie, Closet Land . Closet Land has just two characters—a woman and her torturer. It was always going to have a small audience, because it is so intense, so unrelenting. But I wanted to do a movie that gets viewers inside the mind of someone who is being tortured. Torture takes place all over the planet, and I wanted people to be able to see it.
    What I learned from Veronica, her sense of mastery, connects to the psychology of the characters in many other movies and shows. When I first read astronaut Jim Lovell’s account of the explosion and crisis on the Apollo 13 capsule, I couldn’t really grasp the details of the spacecraft, the orbital mechanics, the issues with fuel and carbon dioxide and skipping off the top of Earth’s atmosphere. What I connected with immediately was the sense Lovell conveyed of being trapped, of being in a physical setting, also a life-or-death setting, where he and his fellow astronauts had lost control. They had to adopt a mind-set like Veronica’s—they had to create an alternate narrative—to have the psychological strength to get themselves back to Earth. I think that movie, too, owes a lot to Veronica de Negri.
    You might expect someone who had survived what Veronica was put through to be discouraged, to be cynical, to lack a certain basic hope.
    She isn’t like that at all. She’s vibrant. She’s a person of intellect, and obviously a person of inner strength. She isn’t cheery or buoyant, but she has great energy, fierce energy.
    And she has this incredible human capacity to rely on herown psychic strength to survive. That’s what is so urgent to me about people’s emotional makeup. What saved Veronica was her character, her personality, the story she was able to tell herself.
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    CURIOSITY CONNECTS YOU TO reality.
    I live in two overlapping worlds that are often far from reality: the world of Hollywood show business, and the world of storytelling. In Hollywood, we have a sense of being at the center of the world. Our creative work touches everyone in the United States, as well as a huge part of the rest of the world. We deal with actors and directors who are famous and, in Hollywood, powerful—powerful in that they can demand large paychecks, they can command armies of staff and technicians, they can pick their work, they can create whole new worlds from scratch, and they can specify all kinds of quirky elements about things like the food they’ll eat. Our projects involve huge sums of money—both the dollars to get a project made in the first place, and the dollars they make when they succeed in theaters and on TV. The millions are often in the triple digits, and we’re now firmly in the era of the billion-dollar film franchise, and the era of the billion-dollar acting career. 2
    So Hollywood absolutely has a huge sense of importance about what we do, and we have a huge sense of importanceabout the people who do it. It’s possible to lose track of the difference between the stories we’re telling, with as much vividness and texture as we can possibly create, and the real world. For while the money is real—the risks are real, and they are often large—the rest of it is, of course, showbiz, make-believe.
    A comedy about the New York City morgue— Night Shift— doesn’t involve any dead bodies.
    A TV drama about producing a sports news show— Sports Night— involves no sporting events, no sports figures, no news.
    A movie about the brutal reality of drug smuggling— American Gangster —involves no actual drugs or brutality.
    Even in a great love story, no one typically falls in love.
    Just as important, storytelling itself is not reality. That may seem obvious, but it’s not at all. When you come home from work and tell your wife or husband “the story” of your day, you reshape those nine