Image Entertainment’s Brian Grazer on the power of curiosity
Multi-award winning producer Brian Grazer, who along with co-founder Ron Howard drives powerhouse Imagine Entertainment, is on a mission; not just to tell the most exciting stories in film and TV, but to challenge himself to remain curious and engaged with a broad spectrum of thinkers.
Recently, Brian sat down with REDEF CEO + Chief Curator Jason Hirschhorn at LionTree’s Media 2.0 conference in Los Angeles, regaling him with lessons from his life and his view on the state of storytelling in present-day Hollywood. Here’s what we learned:
1. Brian’s advice for getting noticed: skip the small talk, be interesting
You never know who you’ll meet or where you’ll meet them. When a gig delivering legal papers landed him face-to-face with Warren Beaty, Brian knew it would be wise to get the filmmaker’s attention. “I immediately invent a conversation. I don’t pause. I don’t do small talk. But I really kick it up to where I’m interesting to him,” he said describing how he turned the chance encounter into an hour-long conversation. If you’re looking to get noticed quickly, try approaching all interactions with a few deep conversation starters ready to go.
2. Every interaction is an opportunity to learn
Thinking back on the hour he spent with Beaty, Brian said, “I did reflect, of course, driving back, not just on the star trip of it all, more importantly, he was explaining to me his perspective on show business on some level, and of course that leads to demystifying the language of the entertainment business. How this all works, because it’s so opaque.”
One of the best ways to glean information from an interesting encounter is to find something the other person is excited about. Show that you want to learn more about the topic by asking a series of questions related to it.
3. Use your perceived handicaps to your advantage
Brian has acute dyslexia, but he found a way to leverage his unique attention span for his benefit. “I just got straight Fs, and so, therefore, I had to find other ways to learn. I found that I could learn by conversations.” Ultimately, he realized that this was a way to fire up his curiosity engine. He didn’t just stop there — he followed his curiosity and conversations led him down a deeper rabbit hole. “I just found that through face to face communication you gained a lot, and if you could read, which became something I could do, it was very, very valuable. So I could research people.”
4. Let your curiosity lead you
Brian saw an opportunity in writing his own script and not boxing himself into the typical Hollywood trajectory. “I saw that my appetite widened as opposed to narrowed and that I became very interested in not just movies and television shows, which are sort of finite time parameters, but I liked all sizes and shapes,” he said.
On following your curiosity and staying open to the outcome, Brian offers the following insight: “You’ll have an idea or a belief and then in order to prove it out, the documentary, you have to grab all these archives and assemble it. And often what you’ve set to prove out varies from how it started.”
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Listen to Brian in conversation with REDEF CEO + Chief Curator Jason Hirschhorn at LionTree’s Media 2.0 conference in Los Angeles embedded below, and available on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn or wherever you get your podcasts. For more great content from the conference, check out our new podcast, “Conversations From Media 2.0,” wherever you listen.
