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[0:00] Michelle Simone Miller: Welcome to a brand new episode of Mentors on the Mic podcast. This is your host, Michelle Simone Miller. And I'm so thrilled to give you some more wonderful interviews from the Red Carpet at the Hamptons International Film Festival. These were very exciting interviews. I just was absolutely thrilled. So the first one is with legendary Ron Howard. Man, was that a busy carpet. I will give more behind the scenes on the Substack essay. So follow my Substack. The link is in my show notes. We could just look up Michelle Miller on Substack if you are interested. But it was a crazy Red Carpet. And with some of these Red Carpets, when they got a little nuts, they really only let us do one question. And so for this one, I had to be really, really sort of, you know, focused, laser and laser focused as to what my question.

And it's a funny thing to be asked. Like if you had one question you could ask Ron Howard, what would it be? And in this type of setting, I had to make it, I think, very sort of aligned with Avedon, which is the name of the film that he directed at this festival. And it's all about the artist, the photographer, Richard Avedon. And Ron Howard traced his life and legacy as an artist. So I won't give you an idea what my question was, but let me know what you think and if it was the right question to ask. I think at the end he did say, I think I'll leave it in, but he did say something like, I hope I answered your question. I was like, you did, you totally did. So yeah, you might know Ron Howard.

He's just phenomenal. I mean, you definitely know him. But just to kind of go over as I do everybody, you might know him as an actor from things like, God, Happy Days I used to watch, but also like, I don't know if you're a fan of Arrested Development, that's his voice in every episode. I would love to ask him questions about that too. Then also he's directed some of the most amazing movies like Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Hillbilly Elegy, right, with Amy Adams and Glenn Close, like just phenomenal movies. I can't literally go on and on about them. So my question with Ron Howard. And then I also included this, my red carpet, with Tony and John Gilroy, who I was very, very excited to meet.

They worked on the film Behemoth, which also was at the Hampton Film Festival, and I also was able to get a ticket for it. So I could tell you it was fantastic. It was one of my favorite movies from the festival. Just it's about a gifted cellist played by Pedro Pascal, who has spent 20 years moving between regional symphonies, as well as casual flings. So you have, you know, the ups and downs and the sort of got back and forth between the present and the past, right? And you figure out, well, why did he move all these times and also like what his relationships were. And so you kind of get his sort of emotional and like human journey, in addition to getting behind the scenes of like what it would be like to be a cellist, not only in regional symphonies, but also when he's in L.A., which is where he's from.

He talks about like being in these orchestras for like movie soundtracks. I just thought it was the whole thing was so well done. And so, you know, just put together really, really well. And it stars also Olivia Wilde, Will Arnett, Eva Victor and Alexis Swinton. If you have the opportunity to see Behemoth, I'm hoping it comes out. I think it's supposed to maybe come out later this year if they do have a distribution deal. I've heard rumors about that. I've seen it online. But it's a wonderful narrative feature. And Tony Gilroy, just such a wonderful man. He had most of my like most of the answers were from Tony. I don't know if that was just based on their dynamic or if John just wanted him to answer most of them.

But maybe it was just my question sounded more like questions to the director and writer. But he has directed, let's start with what he's directed. So he's directed Michael Clayton, which he also wrote. He directed and wrote The Bourne Legacy. He also wrote and directed Duplicity. He also is he wrote and directed Behemoth. Right. But he also has done the screenplay for incredible movies and shows, not just Michael Clayton, but also Rogue One, a Star Wars story. Andor, he was the he worked on that as well. Bourne Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum and Legacy, Legacy, which he directed. And then John Gilroy has worked as an editor and producer with him a lot on certain movies, as well as like Andor, Rogue One, Michael Clayton.

But he also edited movies like Suicide Squad, Salt. Just the list goes on and on. So I could have talked to each of them forever, but I asked them questions and I had a little bit more time. And that was really lovely. So definitely check out the clips of which I'm going to post on social media, on YouTube. So follow me on Instagram at Michelle Simone Miller and at Mentors on the Mic. Follow me on YouTube. All the links are in the show notes. And also, you know, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And also check out our Substack where I'll be giving, like I said, behind the scenes on the red carpets and the movies that I saw at the Hampton Film Festival. So without further ado, here's Ron Howard, Tony Gilroy and John Gilroy.

[5:41] Tony Gilroy: Well, first, thank you so much for answering my questions. Can you introduce yourself for me and for the audience?

[5:45] John Gilroy: Yes. And then your brother.

[5:47] Tony Gilroy: I'm John Gilroy.

[5:49] Michelle Simone Miller: Excellent. So you are the director and the writer of this film. Can you tell us a little bit? I know you did it before, but a little bit about Behemoth and what's it about?

[5:56] Tony Gilroy: Behemoth is the story. Pedro Pascal plays a cellist, a very, very good cellist from a third generation L.A. studio musical family. He's been a sort of nomadic symphonic player for 20 years. He returns to Los Angeles to do session work. When he comes back, the sessions, that part of the movie takes place chronologically. But as he begins to cut cues and sessions, the music begins to trigger flashbacks and you find out why he's left for 20 years and why he's really come back.

[6:28] Michelle Simone Miller: I'm very excited to see it. I'm actually going to see it right after this. This is great. I always usually start with what was the first, your first role in the entertainment industry. And I was really excited to talk to you about cutting edge screenplay because I loved it. But let's go back a little bit earlier before writing. Can you talk about pursuing music in L.A.?

[6:45] Tony Gilroy: I was, I wanted very badly to be a musician. And I had a trip when I was like 19 to go out to L.A. Someone invited me to come out and play on their road band. And I had fantasies about being a studio player at that point as a guitar player. And it was about three or four days in after going to two or three sessions that I realized exactly how good I was not. And it took me another 10 years to really quit. But finally, I did. And can you talk a little bit about music as a through line in some of your stories and your screenplays and how it helps?

[7:20] Tony Gilroy: I’ll say this. I didn't direct until I was much later in life. And then and and I really thought we when we did Michael Clayton, we were like, oh, man, we're going to kill the music. I'm going to really kill you. And it was very instructive how how difficult it was to put together. And it's been 20 years since then. I've been both luxuriating in the in the world of movie scoring and also being humbled by it and learning about it. And it's really been a place of great interest to me. So the idea that we could finally make a movie about this has been a very happy place for me.

[7:53] John Gilroy: Yeah. And Johnny was a musician as well. We grew up.

[7:57] Tony Gilroy: I was going to go. Yeah. And I was going to talk a little. Yeah. You can talk about that actually first.

[8:01] John Gilroy: No, I didn't pursue it professionally, but I played saxophone and my dad was sort of a bit of a frustrated musician. So he desperately wanted me to become a jazz musician. And I decided, you know, they didn't make any money. I said, Dad, they're broke all the time, these guys. And so I didn't I didn't do that. But Tony pursued it.

[8:22] Tony Gilroy: Tony had a better, better time. Actually, I liked that. I mean, I think you both grew up in California, but you were born in New York.

[8:26] John Gilroy: No, I grew up in upstate upstate New York. I was born my brother and I, my twin brother and I were born in California, but we all moved to upstate New York. So one thing I will say, because we've been Johnny's been cutting all of our movies. I brought one thing that you do bring if you if you have a deep background in music. I mean, editing's tempo. I think we're always many disagreements that we have. We never disagree about tempo. We're always in the pocket.

[8:53] Michelle Simone Miller: And then I guess I'll just ask one more quick question then about the editing as well, which is nine composers for this film. So I'm very excited for that. Can we just talk a little bit about editing that and creating a cohesive story?

[9:08] Tony Gilroy: It's a very long conversation of nine composers. Yeah, they all do all the all the music that they compose is comes from the film from different sources, right? It is a it's a great variety of musicians. It's a great variety of different flavors of music. And all the pieces, they all had their own way of arriving in the movie. Some of them are science projects that required incredible amount of detail. Some of them are one or two of them were done after the fact. It's they all they all had their own delivery. And the other headline is, is they had to be they had to be done a lot. I'd say nine before the production. So we had to really had to come up with the music was done, which is never done. So it's nine composers doing most of the music up front, and then really using music as a template for all the musical scenes and what it's very, very interesting and sort of, you know, a long conversation.

[10:00] Michelle Simone Miller: How do you not stay precious about that in the editing room? Like if you if you put so much time and make a lot of effort to not be trying not to be precious right now.

[10:08] Tony Gilroy: Oh, fair. Well, it's not working.

[10:14] John Gilroy: No, there's failure. Total failure.

[10:16] Michelle Simone Miller: All right. Well, thank you guys so much. I'm looking forward to it.

[10:21] Michelle Simone Miller: Hi, this is Michelle Simone Miller with Mentors on the Mic podcast, and I am at the red carpet soon to be with Ron Howard at the Hamptons International Film Festival. So excited. Can't wait to take you. I'm great. How are you?

[10:35] Ron Howard: Good. My question is about taking a real life person like Avedon, taking a lifetime of experiences and turning it into a compelling human story. How do you do that?

[10:43] Ron Howard: Well, it's I mean, first of all, it's very challenging. And if you do a scripted movie, you're more trying to capture the spirit because you're going to have to interpret things and, you know, and create a movie experience for audiences. It really takes them on a ride. With documentaries, the audience expects something else. They want to learn. And that's the most frustrating thing, because you have to still have to distill the information into a format that's digestible, you know. So with Avedon, it was a huge challenge because I had no idea the breadth of his work, the decades of not only doing the high end fashion, but also capturing, you know, like some of the drama of the world, almost journalistically, you know.

And so it took three years, three years of work and many, many cuts, many, many variations. We kept learning interview after interview, archival deep dive after archival dive. And, you know, I'm proud of where we landed with it. I'm excited to see it. Thank you so much.

[11:48] Michelle Simone Miller: Thank you so much for listening to Mentors on the Mic. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend in entertainment you know would love it. Let me know what you've learned or what stayed with you on our Instagram at Mentors on the Mic. I love reading your messages. You can also find me at Michelle Simone Miller on Instagram. On both accounts, I'll be sharing even more information about our mentors. Talk to someone about what you learned today who would really appreciate it and send them the episode. Also, if you love the show, please go ahead and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It really makes a huge difference in growing this. It makes it easier for people to find our podcast. And I love reading your reviews. So thank you so much, and I'll see you next week.