I live in the storytelling capital of the world. I tell stories for a living. You're probably familiar with many of my films, from Rain Man and Batman to Midnight Express to Gorillas in the Mist to this year's The Kids Are All Right.
But in four decades in the movie business, I've come to see that stories are not only for the big screen, Shakespearean plays, and John Grisham novels. I've come to see that they are far more than entertainment. They are the most effective form of human communication, more powerful than any other way of packaging information. And telling purposeful stories is certainly the most efficient means of persuasion in everyday life, the most effective way of translating ideas into action, whether you're green-lighting a $90 million film project, motivating employees to meet an important deadline, or getting your kids through a crisis.
PowerPoint presentations may be powered by state-of-the-art technology. But reams of data rarely engage people to move them to action. Stories, on the other hand, are state-of-the-heart technology—they connect us to others. They provide emotional transportation, moving people to take action on your cause because they can very quickly come to psychologically identify with the characters in a narrative or share an experience—courtesy of the images evoked in the telling.
Equally important, they turn the audience/listeners into viral advocates of the proposition, whether in life or in business, by paying the story—not just the information—forward.
Stories, unlike straight-up information, can change our lives because they directly involve us, bringing us into the inner world of the protagonist. As I tell the students in one of my UCLA graduate courses, Navigating a Narrative World, without stories not only would we not likely have survived as a species, we couldn't understand ourselves. They provoke our
memory and give us the framework for much of our
understanding. They also reflect the way the
brain works. While we think of stories as fluff, accessories to information, something extraneous to real work, they turn out to be the cornerstone of consciousness.
Much of what I know about narrative and its power I learned over the course of working in the entertainment industry. In the early 1980s, I was chairman of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment as well as a producer at that studio. I was pitched a movie to finance and distribute based on a book then titled The Execution of Charles Horman. It told the true story of Ed Horman, Charles's father, a politically conservative American who goes to South America in search of his missing journalist son. Ed joins with his daughter-in-law Beth, who, like her husband, is politically polarized from the father, in prying through bureaucracy and dangerous government intrigue in search of their son and husband. Gradually, the father comes to realize his own government is concealing the truth.
Although the project had enlisted a great filmmaker—Oscar winner Costa Gavras (for the thriller Z)—I didn't find it compelling. A Latin American revolution was a tough sell for a commercial American film, along with the story of a father who had no relationship with his son and the fact that you already knew the ending: The son is dead without the father ever finding him. This story was dead on arrival as an investment.
Out of courtesy, I met with the father, who knew I was not a fan. After a few polite introductions, he nodded to some pictures of my then-teenage daughters on my bookcase. "Do you really know your children?" he asked. "Really know them?" He went on to tell me a story—that the search for his son was more a search for who he was than where he was, because he always suspected he was dead. But the journey was a revelation, not least about the many values father and son in fact shared. It was a love story, not a death story.
His telling engaged me in a unique personal way, emotionally transporting me into the search for his child, and it made me wonder whether I really knew my daughters, their values and beliefs, their hopes and
dreams. If the writer could focus the film as a love story/thriller and an actor could engage those emotions and pique those questions, and the film could be executed to get critical acclaim, it really might be worth backing.
His narrative migrated from my heart to my head to my wallet. I green-lit the movie, called Missing. Jack Lemmon took on the role of Ed Horman. The same question asked of me was the one that sold Lemmon on the movie, too—the Trojan horse that got directly inside his psyche. He was, after all, a father. Missing won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It also won the highest honor at Cannes, along with the Best Actor award for Lemmon.
The first rule of telling stories is to give the audience—whether it's one business person or a theater full of moviegoers—an emotional experience. The heart is always the first target in telling purposeful stories. Stories must give listeners an emotional experience if they are to ignite a call to action.
