A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer Page B

hours to highlight the drama, to make your own role the centerpiece, to leave out the boring parts (which may be eight hours of the nine). And you’re telling a real story about your real day.
    In the movies and on TV, we’re always trying to tell stories that are true—whether it’s Frost/Nixon , about real people and real events, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas! , about a child’s fantasy. The stories need to be “true” in emotional terms, true in thematic terms, not necessarily true in factual terms. For any movie that purports to tackle a set of real events, there’s now typically a website detailing all the things we “gotwrong”—you can read about the departures from reality in Gravity and Captain Phillips . We released Apollo 13 in the summer of 1995—before Google was on the Internet—but you can read about the ways the movie differs from the factual story of the rescue at a half dozen websites. 3 You can even read about the differences between 2014’s movie Noah with Russell Crowe, and the biblical Noah, that is, the differences between the movie and the “real” story of a mythic biblical figure. 4
    The truth is, we want to tell great stories, captivating stories, and so we tweak the stories all the time—in fact, when we’re making a movie or a TV show, we tweak the stories every day, while we’re making them—in order to get more immediacy, or to move things along more quickly. We tweak them to make them seem more realistic, even when we’re actually deviating from the “facts.” We’re all storytellers, and in about the third grade we start to learn the difference between a story that is true and a story that is factually correct.
    It is very easy to get caught up in the urgency and the charisma of Hollywood. It’s a hermetic world (it doesn’t help that we’re in California, far from a lot of the big decision making in Washington, DC, and New York City). It’s very easy to get caught up in the world of episodic storytelling.
    Curiosity pulls me back to reality. Asking questions of real people, with lives outside the movie business, is a bracing reminder of all the worlds that exist beyond Hollywood.
    You can make as many movies as you want about war or black ops or revolution or prison. They’re just movies. Whatwas done to Veronica de Negri was not a movie, it was real—her pain and her survival.
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    WHEN YOU WATCH A movie that is completely engrossing, what happens to you? I’m talking about one of those movies where you lose track of time, where everything fades away except the fate of the characters, and their world, on screen. One of those movies where you walk out onto the sidewalk afterward, blinking, reentering reality, thinking, Wow, it’s a Sunday afternoon in spring. Whew.
    When you binge-watch the latest episodes of Arrested Development or House of Cards , what causes you to touch the PLAY button just one more time, six times in a row?
    When you read a book, what keeps you in the chair, turning pages way past the moment when you should have set the book down and gone to sleep?
    National Public Radio knows exactly how riveting its radio storytelling can be. NPR has figured out that people often park, turn off the engine, then sit in the car in the driveway, waiting to hear the end of a particular story that isn’t quite finished. NPR calls these “driveway moments.” 5 Why would anyone put the last three minutes of a story on NPR ahead of going inside to dinner and their family?
    Curiosity.
    Curiosity keeps you turning the pages of the book, it tugsyou along to watch just one more episode, it causes you to lose track of the day and the time and the weather when you’re in a theater seat. Curiosity creates NPR’s “driveway moments.” 6
    Curiosity is a vital piece of great storytelling—the power of a story to