Tiller Russell’s Silk Road film blends real DEA corruption with Ross Ulbricht’s libertarian descent into legal ruin—two life terms plus 40 years for a platform worth over $3.5B in Bitcoin. He grapples with depicting Ulbricht’s moral dilemmas, like a fatal LSD incident, without sensationalizing, comparing it to pharmaceutical companies’ unintended consequences. Russell’s immersive documentary style, from meeting Tarzan in Moscow to collaborating with "Jurassic Narcs," prioritizes human truth over spectacle, yet struggles with resistance and discipline. Their conversation reveals how obsession with storytelling—whether crime, comedy, or creativity—demands focus, structure, and a willingness to embrace chaos for authenticity. [Automatically generated summary]
And you did a great job of taking something that is a real story and laying it out in a movie format where you only have a certain amount of time with actors.
Well, you know, it's so funny when you're like, you know, I sat down...
So I had written the script for Silk Road several years ago.
And, you know, I have done all these documentaries.
That's my background, right?
Which is kind of where you dive into the...
You know, you do the deep dive on these, you know, crazy crime stories.
That's my whole racket, you know, from Michael Dowd forward.
And then you...
You know, go into the world, suddenly going from the doc thing into the movie thing, and it's like, well, who are the people that are going to inhabit this?
So I sat down and I met with, you know, all these amazing actors, and you sort of are looking at, okay, what if it's this version of the movie?
What if it's this kid?
What if it's this, you know, what if it's this guy?
And then suddenly, Jason Clarke, who I'd been a fan of forever, he was like, dude, I'm hip to that.
What happened is there were a couple of corrupt law enforcement officers.
There was a DEA guy, there was a Treasury guy, and so what I had done is kind of combined them into that character because I've spent a lot of time in the documentaries hanging out with guys like that.
And also people who have relationships, long-term relationships with informants.
So I was able to kind of take the work that I had done in the docs and put it into the movie so that it's drawn from real life.
It's drawn from people I know, but it's kind of a hybrid between the two.
Well, and with something like that, a story like this, there are the people that...
I was one of the people that was fully geeked on this story.
I remember...
The day after Ross Ulbricht was arrested in the San Francisco Library, in the sci-fi section of the Glen Park Library, I was off shooting some crime doc or another, and I remember vividly opening the newspaper, and it just had kind of like the shadowy headlines of the story.
It was like Dark Web, Bitcoin, Dread Pirate Roberts.
But none of the stuff was in the zeitgeist yet.
We hadn't even really heard of Bitcoin.
But I remember thinking like, man, there's a story there.
Maybe it's a movie.
Maybe it's a doc.
But there's something.
And I was just kind of fascinated from the get-go.
And then obsessively tracking the story as new pieces of information would come out.
And then eventually there was this Rolling Stone reporter, this guy by the name of David Kushner, who's this brilliant writer and reporter, has like a nose for story and is able to get to people.
And he had gotten to Ross Ulbricht's girlfriend in Austin and then the family.
And so he wrote this profile of Ross that was this very kind of relatable humanist portrait.
And suddenly when I read that piece, I was like, oh, okay, now I can like connect with this guy in some fundamental emotional way.
But at the time, none of the stuff about the corrupt cops had broken.
None of that stuff was in the public.
Nothing had been reported on.
And I think that the feds deliberately kept that information under wraps so as not to screw up the prosecution of Ross, right?
But I was – knowing people in DEA, knowing people in U.S. Attorney's Office from making the 7-5, from making Operation Odessa, whatever, those guys would call me and they were like, man, there's a whole other amazing half of this story, which is the crooked cop side of the story.
Suddenly when I saw that, I thought, okay, Now that's a movie because I can imagine these two sort of people.
I always thought of it as almost like they're missiles on a collision course flying right at each other.
And so suddenly when I had that in my head, I was like, I can make a movie out of that.
At a certain point, I remember on set and kind of going up to it, people were like, okay, so what's factual and what's fictional?
What's factual and what's fictional?
And I... At a certain point...
I was like, I need to pour myself into this because there wasn't, you know, when you're making a doc, you're going out and you're harvesting people and you're harvesting information and you're harvesting photos, videos, news footage.
This was like, there was a limited amount of information.
And so then when the information ran out, it was like, okay, what am I going to pour in here?
I can research it the way I would do a doc, but really, if I'm going to make this something that's True and authentic to me, I kind of poured myself into it.
And he developed this Silk Road platform where you could buy all kinds of drugs and then ultimately you could buy guns as well and a lot of other illegal things.
And his...
The way you portrayed him is really fascinating too, and I wonder how much of it is accurate, because you portrayed him as this sort of really intelligent, idealistic young man who ultimately believed that people should have the freedom to buy, sell, use, choose, whatever they like.
And that the people who support Silk Road, that's how they felt.
And people that are proponents Of a lot of these, particularly psychedelics, which I'm one of them, they like that.
Like, yeah, who is a grown adult to tell another grown adult what they can and can't use?
Wouldn't it be great if there were some online marketplace that was free from the tentacles of the American government and you could buy whatever you wanted?
Well, there was, and he created it.
And it's...
In the sense that it's an important American story.
Yes, and his story, what fascinated me about his story was you have this guy that starts out as a very kind of naive, innocent guy.
He's somebody who wants to make his mark in the world, wants to change the world, and goes into it with an open heart and good intentions.
And there was a lot of information about him When I first sat down to write the script, he was locked up in MCC in New York, actually exactly where Michael Dowd from the 7-5 had been locked up years earlier, right?
And so I sat down and I wrote him a letter.
And he was in awaiting sentencing, I think, at the time.
But I knew his lawyers were never going to give me access to him, right?
Rightly so, because it would potentially screw up his defense.
But I felt like, you know, I owe it to this guy in some fundamental sense if I'm going to tell his story to try to connect with him.
And I'm a doc guy.
That's my process, you know?
And so I wrote him a letter, and I never heard back.
But then he had left the This kind of amazing archive of breadcrumbs in his past.
He had written all of these public posts on the Silk Road website as Dread Pirate Roberts where he's putting out his philosophy, his ethos, his convictions.
And then at the same time, he had been secretly keeping a journal long before he had launched Silk Road all the way through it up until the bitter end.
And so when he got busted, they confiscated his laptop.
And when they opened up his laptop, they had all of his private journal entries.
So there was the combination of his public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts and the diary entries as Ross Ulbricht.
And so while I didn't have access to the guy, I had access to his words and who – I guess accidental self-portrait in some way or another.
And so when we got into your question of how much of this is, you know, journalistically accurate.
So every piece of voiceover in the movie that's spoken by Nick Robinson who plays Ross Ulbricht, all of that is either taken from the diary entries or taken from the public postings as Dread Pirate Roberts.
And then all of the chat logs, all of the back and forth, the encrypted communications between You know, Nob and Dread Pirate Roberts.
All of that stuff is taken from the documentary record.
Because I felt like you have to be true to who this guy is, in some sense, spiritually, you know?
But what ended up happening was his ex-girlfriend, who's here in Austin, Julia V., who's portrayed in the movie by the actress Alexandra Shipp, she became a consultant for it.
When I was writing the script, and then when making the movie, because I felt like I needed somebody who knew this guy, who loved him, who had an intimate viewpoint on who he was.
And so she became my kind of source and way in, in an emotional sense, right?
Well, you did a great job of portraying the obsession that he had with all the inner workings of the website and seeing it ramp up through the website's growth and development.
Was it Gawker that made the article about it and then it just exploded?
I remember that article.
I remember it very clearly.
Like when you showed the image of that article, I remember going, wow, I remember that article.
The crazy thing is there were several iterations of Silk Road that happened.
So like the feds came in, like seized it, and then all of a sudden like on the website it was like seized by the FBI, you know, putting the word out as the feds are kind of pissing on the territory.
But then, I forget what amount of time, I've forgotten the details at this point, but six months later or whatever, Silk Road 2.0 comes up.
Then the feds shut that down.
Then Silk Road 3.0 comes up.
It's kind of like, I think, the genie never goes back in the bottle.
Once the technology is out there, it's going to, in some way or another, continue to persist.
That is a problem when you're dealing with corrupt cops too, right?
Like they literally could have faked him doing that.
We don't know.
Has he denied that he called hits?
We should explain to people that haven't seen the film.
Spoiler alert.
It goes off the rails for Ross, for young Ross.
And at one point in time, the guy he's working with gets busted and rats him out.
And then the cops are using that guy's account and communicating with him.
And he orders a hit on that guy.
And the guy gets to see it and is like, holy shit, I can't believe this.
Who knows how much of that is real and how much is not.
But the problem is you're dealing with corrupt cops.
And if the corrupt cops wanted to frame him for something that's going to put him away for a long time, just running the website and allowing people a portal where they can do this and sell things is not quite good enough.
But if you can get a guy to literally call for murder not once but twice, then you've really got him locked up.
Well, not only did he deny it, but what happened was – so to back up a step, basically, the corrupt cop in the movie, the corrupt cop at a certain point sets out to bust Ross.
And then at a certain point, he's like kind of getting cock-blocked by his superiors and whatever.
And so he says, okay, I'm going to rip this kid off instead.
If I can't bust him, I'm going to steal the money and I'm going to use it for my own purposes.
But what ends up happening is, and all of that information, by the way, the fake murder of his employee and the photographs that were taken of it, all of that stuff is true.
That's all in the real story.
And as we're shooting the movie, we have access to the actual faked murder photos.
Working with that guy was so fun, you know, because like, again, we had the, you know, we had information about the real guy.
And what happened was when that guy gets busted, when chronic pain gets busted, in this article it said he had a chihuahua.
And the chihuahua's going batshit, barking crazy as the feds are kicking in the door or whatever.
And we're sitting there and I'm thinking like, man, chihuahua going batshit on set, that's going to screw up the dialogue.
What do we do?
And so I'm talking to Paul and Paul's like, what if we give him a ferret instead of...
And I'm like, ferret, dude, let's go ferret, you know?
And then the other brilliant thing that Paul did was he said, you know, all of this, like, you know, all this online chatter where it's, you know, you're typing on the computer and then the other person types back.
He's like, what if the dude's a mumbler?
So he's kind of saying this shit out loud the whole time that he's talking and he starts talking to himself.
So once he had the ferret and made the guy a mumbler, he had like the keys to the character.
So starting out with, you had asked me if I had reached out to him.
So I reached out to him when he was locked up in MCC New York awaiting sentencing.
And then all the way through, the case was working its way through the appeals process.
And then finally, he was hoping that Trump was going to pardon him.
And there was a big kind of hullabaloo, okay, is Trump going to pardon him on his last day in office?
And he didn't.
And I was sitting there watching the news waiting to see if he would.
And I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I'm going to look it up.
And so I went on to the Bureau of Prisons website and I typed in Ross's name and it comes up, you know, Tucson Penitentiary.
And then it said, release date, colon, life.
And it just like, it hit me, you know, this kid's 36 years old, he's 10 years younger than I am, and just staring down the barrel of that.
And so I sat down, even though the movie's, you know, coming out or whatever at the time, and I decide, you know what, I owe this guy and some fun, like just human being, man to man.
So I write him a letter and I said, listen, man, I've made this movie and this is my portrait of you and my portrait of your story and of Silk Road.
And it's coming out into the world.
But if you ever want to tell your version of the story in any form or fashion, you want to do it as a Rolling Stone interview, you want to do it as a documentary, you want to do it any way you want, you tell me and I will be there in person to sit down with you.
Because I do feel like there's some kind of...
I don't know, I guess like spiritual contract between me and him.
Like when you enter into a story like this, you're in somebody else's life in a real way.
And who knows, you know, the way it was reported that he was closely considering it, but in the kind of last days of the, you know, chaotic into the administration or whatever, it didn't happen.
But I was, you know, because no matter what you think of Ross's politics or what he did as a, you know, or Silk Road even, There is this thing where, like, I'm a believer in second chances, man.
You know, I've screwed up a million things in my lifetime, and I feel like somebody like that hopefully has something to give the world, you know, and isn't thrown away.
Well, I think in some way or another it was like this changed the drug war, right?
It changed the way the drug game happened and it changed the way the drug war was fought.
Suddenly it's like it's almost an existential threat to the drug war when it's not by busts and hand-to-hand and all the street stuff that we've seen since Nixon unleashes DEA. You know, in 73 or whatever the year is, suddenly it's, wait a minute, all happening online, anonymous, DHL, USPS, people are delivering it.
Nobody even knows that they're carrying it.
So it was like, it was an existential threat to the US government, to the DEA, to the drug war.
And I wonder, looking back on it, it's always kind of hindsight is 20-20, but he had been beating the system for a long time, right?
He was like one dude with a laptop that unleashed this thing that kind of metastasized and went over the whole world.
And he was winning for a while.
He was ahead of the feds.
He was ahead of the U.S. Attorney's Office.
He had Chuck Schumer there, you know, calling for his head, and yet he continued to kind of game the system and beat him by just being nimble and being able to throw his laptop in his backpack and roll on to the next location.
So maybe, you know, maybe he thought he'd be able to continue beating the system.
Well, I think, you know, one of the things when I looked at the federal penitentiary where he's being held is you actually can, they give everybody access to the computers and to email periodically once you get on the list.
Legitimately, if you were the prosecuting attorney and you knew that you had corrupt cops giving bad information and stealing money and you were an ethical person, you're supposed to release that information and it should taint the eyes of the jury.
All of that was deliberately concealed so that they could, you know, hammer him in the prosecution.
And look, I'm a strong, like, law enforcement guy, right?
Like, in the sense of, you know, I have made a bunch of documentaries that are about cops.
Some of them are corrupt cops, like Michael Dowd.
Some of them are...
Righteous cops, like the guy that investigated the Kiki Camarena murder, the murder of the D agent in 1985. And so I've spent my whole kind of professional life knocking around cops and prosecutors.
It's now gone all the way through the system, and the only way he gets out is clemency or a pardon by somebody.
Otherwise, that kid's spending the rest of his life...
And I called his mother recently, in Austin too, actually, about the same time, and I had not spoken with her beforehand, and I reached out, again, just in sort of human terms, and I said, you know, how are you doing?
And she said, I'm not doing too good, man.
My kid's gonna die in prison.
That was the opening words of the conversation.
And I just said, hey, if the tables were...
She's like, why are you calling me?
And I said, because if the tables were turned, I'd want somebody to call my mom too.
Well, but it goes back to your original point, too, which is like, okay, if you have the intention to commit murder, if it really was him that did it, have you crossed a fundamental line?
Because I think, and to me, that's what makes all of these stories interesting, stories like this interesting, is it's not clear-cut.
And it's not, you know, good guy, bad guy.
You've got – it's the gray area in between.
To me, as a filmmaker, what is interesting is somebody that isn't wholly good and isn't – or isn't wholly a gangster.
It's somebody that's in between and, like, the forces of light are warring with the forces of darkness inside them, you know?
You know, you did a great job of portraying him as very tortured by his decision, especially the one where he's seeing his girlfriend now hanging out with some other guy and he's drunk and, you know, makes a call.
The whole thing was very believable.
But how much of that was based on real accounts of what was going down or how much of that was fiction?
And so there was a lot of information about him and there was information in his own words.
So anywhere where I had that information, it was like let's hew closely to that.
And then I had his ex-girlfriend, right, who is there telling me – because a big question I had for her early on is, okay, this libertarian ethos, this notion that like everybody has the right to do whatever they want, This is America, right?
If you want to pop a pill, snort a line, do whatever, like you have the God-given right to do so.
How much of that was legitimate and how much of it was a mask that he's just wearing for the site, for the public to sell it?
And she said, this is exactly who this guy was.
At his most basic core level was a believer in our individual rights and freedoms.
And he'd sit there and argue with people in bars and say, hey, this is our constitutional right.
And so once I had that kind of piece of the character and I knew, okay, That's what animates this guy in a basic sense.
Then it gave me something to kind of hook onto.
And there's people that don't like the politics, that will argue against that.
And at the end of the day, my feeling is it's not my job to pass a moral judgment.
Even in the same way with Michael Dowd and the 7-5, it's not my job to tell you, hey, this is a good guy, this is a bad guy.
It's, here's the story, here's the characters, here's the world.
Make up your own mind.
Hopefully people are arguing about it one way or another.
You know, one of the things that's crazy about that story is from the time he unleashes the site until the time he's busted, it's less than two years, right?
This guy's got an entire lifetime's worth of drama that happens to him in 18 months' time.
Federal government seizes it and confiscates it, although there was just, I read in the news, and I don't know the details of this, but there was a bunch of, you know, significant amount of, meaning like hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, missing Bitcoin.
For me, every single one of these true stories or based on a true story has a big moral question to it.
When I'm making The Night Stalker for Netflix...
The question is, okay, you've got all these brutal crime scene photos of people that are just essentially gutted and just the most horrible stuff ever.
And so it becomes this question of, okay, how much of that stuff do you show the world?
Or how much of it do you conceal because you want it to be a compelling show that people are able to watch?
And so every single one of them has a big...
Moral question where you're constantly kind of struggling with it.
With Silk Road, you know, the hits is a big thing because, okay, there's no guarantee that it was necessarily him behind the keys ordering them.
But at the same time, you know, a reasonable mind would assume, okay, you're the guy that's got the keys to the kingdom.
You're broadcasting everything else.
Presumably it is you that makes this decision.
But it's, you know, that's the thing with these crime stories and these true stories is...
It constantly requires me to make moral judgments about what to include and what not to include.
Yeah, that's what I would, particularly with that, well, I guess with Richard Ramirez and the Night Stalker, like, you've got bodies, they're real photos, you've got, you know, obviously real murders.
My question is with him, if he said he didn't call for those hits, if you portrayed the DEA agent Creating a false account or hacking into his account in some way.
Well, say he's got employees that are working with...
I mean, theoretically, there are people that are co-conspirators, collaborators that have access to different things, and maybe it's not him that's actually typing it.
I mean, I think most reasonable minds would conclude that was the decision, and that was the intent.
But at the same time, you can't prove it, because that's the whole thing with the sort of anonymous internet, no accountability.
It would have to be someone who had access to his laptop.
Did they get a log from the laptop that showed that type, like the typed out words, like put the hit on that guy, however he said it, that that came from that laptop?
Basically, what happened was they ended up – he uses – instead of using a local server, he uses like a server farm in Iceland so that as people – the feds are trying to track him, it's going to this weird-ass locale that's not tied to him geographically.
So eventually the feds get access to the server farm in Iceland and they're able to...
The simplified version of this is they open it up and they're looking at it in real time from the inside.
So it's as if they're watching from his laptop but in another location.
How did they do that?
Because he had made a coding error very early on because he taught himself all this.
Like this guy wasn't a trained...
You know, coder.
He taught himself all of this, like, in his own time, looking stuff up on, you know, YouTube and whatever, the dark web and wherever else.
And so he had made an early coding error and had left his email address somewhere, rossulbricht at gmail.com.
Which is like people wanting to relive their thing.
I remember very early on, one of the earliest jobs I had was I went out on the crab fishing boats in the Bering Sea doing what turned out to be deadliest catch once upon a time, right?
And so I'm out there on these crab fishing boats and I'm thinking like, who's going to watch this shit?
You know, sort of crabs pulled out of the ocean.
Who cares?
And there was this kid on there that was like a young kid that had washed up in Alaska, you know, gotten tossed from the army, smoking dope or something.
And he ends up in Alaska and he's on this boat and he starts telling me, man, I'm having nightmares that I'm going to like fall over this boat in the middle of the night.
And eventually...
He's out there fishing in the middle of the night, throws one of the crab pots over, and the rope catches his leg, yanks his ass into the water, right?
And the alarms start going off, and I go running out there in the middle of the night to see what the deal is.
And my cameraman, who's with me at the time, is like, dude, we've got to help these guys.
We've got to rescue that kid.
So he drops his camera, and he goes running out to help the other.
And I'm kind of like, dude, my job is to film this shit.
And so I reach down and I pick up the camera and I start shooting and I'm feeling like conflicted again that moral thing like okay should I be like helping or should I be filming this?
And so they grab the kid and miraculously they save him and they pull him onto the deck and he's like shaking with cold you know because your heart gives out in like six minutes when you're in the water like that.
And so I'm holding a camera with one hand and a knife with the other, and I'm cutting the guy's clothes off, right?
And the kid slaps me, and he goes, it's all right, man.
Just film it.
And I'm thinking, like, what world do we live in?
It's insane, right?
And then that's the moment that ends up being like, okay, now we've got a TV show.
Yeah, but people are so aware of what it means to be on television now, or what it means to be on the internet, or what it means to be a part of a thing that a bunch of people are going to see.
It's like why we're still fooling, you know, why are people still watching the story of Richard Ramirez and the Night Stalker 35 years after that happened?
And I think part of the reason why is like this is how we understand these stories is by like telling them, retelling them, having the discussions about like what's the morality of Ross Ulbricht or using crime scene photos of Richard Ramirez.
It's kind of this is the way we culturally process this stuff.
And when we were making Night Stalker, we would get to the point in the interview where it's finally...
I would ask everybody, like, okay, so for some reason or another, this guy becomes like the Jim Morrison of serial killers.
Because when he's paraded through the courtroom, all of a sudden he's got these groupies and fans.
And they're sending him...
And I had gotten access to...
All of the, like, naked pictures that the girls are sending in, you know, because this author had written a book about him, had all this stuff.
And I was like – and you always have to kind of ask that awkward question of, like, so why does this guy become this sort of crazy sex symbol object of – you know, obscure object of desire?
And it's always like kind of an – particularly with the women who are being interviewed, but everybody.
And nobody quite has an answer.
Is it the bad boy thing?
Is it the celebrity thing?
But this is somebody that like – I think as one of the people said, this is somebody that would eat you for dinner, not like – there's no – it's craziness to have any attraction to it.
The act of killing someone, that it's difficult to do, and that it requires someone to be capable of taking another person's life.
And to be close to that person means somehow or another you're protected by them and that they're willing to kill and that this is like something that existed thousands and thousands of years ago in our DNA, this desire to be close to killers because you were more likely to survive because there were so many killers.
Like if you went back in time, you know, a few thousand years ago, murder must have been like really common.
But if they were CGI sex, I wonder if we're ever going to reach – because clearly our desire for whatever it is, depravity, whatever you want to call it, whether it's violence or sex or extreme things that we see in films, it's only getting – Greater, right?
If you look at what was outrageous, like I watched The Shining the other night, and what was outrageous then in terms of like even violence is pretty fucking tame.
Even though it's a wild, crazy movie with Kubrick, you watch a movie today with violence.
Well, but it's also like when you think about depictions of sex in a weird way, it's oftentimes – and I guess maybe the same thing is true with like horror movies.
But it's like the tease can be sexier than the actual sex.
Or, like, Jaws, the shark, it's like, you're thinking the shark's coming, not actually seeing the shark is what's scary about it.
The argument against violent video games is that somehow or another makes people numb to the idea of killing people because you're killing people all the time in these virtual forms.
But the argument for video games is that you get that out.
You get it out of your system.
There's a lot of weird psychology when it comes to things that you're seeing in a film or in a game or any sort of media depiction.
And when we get back to Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht, when you see his story and you see what he – I mean, even if he did call for those murders – In a lot of people's eyes, like, what he was doing was stopping rats, stopping people from fucking up his thing, and that these people were, they were in the way of his idea of what the greater good is.
Well, and, you know, he has the argument with his girlfriend in the movie, where she's like, dude, you're selling, like, crack on the site, you're selling meth on the site.
And his point is, like, hey, if you were to go buy this on the street, there's not a rating system, there's not reviews, like...
My operation is safer than like the old school drug dealers because there actually is some amount of accountability because it's all publicly posted.
He's like, you know, he's like, ketamine is PCP. It's the same thing.
And he's a chemist.
I mean, he's a PhD.
He's a guy who really understands this.
Yeah, he's a clinical researcher.
Right, this is science.
And became a guy who started using these drugs after he became a clinical researcher.
He was basically a teetotaler until he was in his 30s.
And then while he was doing clinical research on these drugs, he started realizing how much we've been sort of misinterpreting the effects or misrepresenting the effects, rather, and how people have these Ideas on what crack is, and a lot of it is based on racist prosecution policies.
Because if you have crack versus coke, the difference in prosecution is fucking astronomical.
Well, it's also weird, you know, we talk about the like cultural shifts, you know, and I always think about this, you know, having done several DEA stories, whether it's the last narc on Amazon, and I think of like hanging out with these, you know, DEA agents who'd like become my friends that are in it.
Well, now all of a sudden, like, you're in California, like the weed store, there's more weed stores in California than there are Starbucks.
Like, how weird must that be for these, like, DEA guys, these, like, old-school, kind of knock-around, like, warriors that dedicated their entire life to the war on drugs.
And then it's like, and then they're like, maybe give me some edibles.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's a crazy, these cultural shifts are so radical.
In our time.
It's like, you know, I wonder if you look at Silk Road 20 years from now and it seems like preposterous that he – or even now maybe, you know, that he gets double life sentences plus 40 without the possibility of parole, you know?
When you're an undercover cop that's carrying a gun and going in, doing a buy bus to get the weed or whatever, literally every time you go to work, You're risking your life, potentially.
And that's like Jason Clarke's character in Silk Road, right?
They call these guys Jurassic Narcs.
Once upon a time, they were door kickers.
The job was like, go in there, get it done.
And they used to say, you know, what kind of piece?
Are you carrying a SIG or what are you carrying?
And all of a sudden, the world changes and it's like, well, how much RAM is on your laptop?
And like these guys are like Peckinpah characters.
They're out of step with the world, man.
You know, like the game has changed and all they know is living by what they learned at the barrel of a gun.
And suddenly the like culture doesn't care anymore.
It's like, no, the drug game is online now.
And like knowing how to work informants or rouse somebody, it's like that shit's irrelevant.
And that's why it grew so fast, you know, from something that, like, nobody had heard of, and it's, like, just a dude with a laptop, till suddenly it's all over the globe, and, you know, people are doing...
And to me, like, this story is a Frankenstein story, right?
In the sense of this guy, this is his masterpiece.
He's creating, like, what he wants to change the world, and suddenly the monster has him by the throat at the end of it, and is, like, squeezing, choking the life out of him.
In fact, I had to call the dad to use the clip, right?
Because there's all sorts of documentary footage scattered in there because I wanted it to be about the real stuff.
And it was a complicated conversation with the dad where it's like, hey, man, I'm making this movie, but your son's story is an important piece of this, and I would like your blessing to include it.
And so I understand the complex morality, like, okay, if that were me and I had lost my kid, I wouldn't be sitting here being like, hey, double life sentence plus 40 is too harsh for Ross.
I mean, look, there's a lot of drugs that are super beneficial to people, pharmaceutical drugs, but sometimes people have adverse reactions and they die.
I'm sure the people who make these medications feel horrible about it.
That these reactions happen to people and they die because of their otherwise beneficial drugs.
What do you do?
Do you arrest them?
Do you close everything down because someone has a weird biology that interacts strangely with some medication?
You don't.
What do you do if someone takes acid and jumps off a roof?
It's complicated, right?
It's one of those uniquely complicated human issues that deals with personal freedom.
Any of these stories that are morally complicated, maybe it's...
People that criticize, you know, my work for, hey, this is somebody that's, you know, taking a real story and turning this into Gonzo Entertainment.
But to me, you know, it's, okay, this is how we explore these stories, is by telling them, retelling them, talking about them, and not, you know, people are smart.
So calling what you did gonzo journalism, I don't think that's fair.
I think what you did is a great way of getting a story out there.
And, you know, yeah, the wife and the daughter that needed money for the school and everything is a little complicated.
And making it one guy instead of two corrupt cops is kind of complicated.
But...
Ultimately, what it's really about is this young man and his girlfriend and his friend and their creation of this thing that really changed the way people were able to access things that were illegal that people wanted.
Definitely encapsulates what a crazy moment it was where this site gained momentum and started and like it showed like when he gets all the text messages in like he's blowing up yeah he's like holy shit what the and he's realizing like oh my god what have I done Yeah.
It's weird, though, to read that tweet now, you know, Ross's tweet of like, okay, here I am 36 years ago.
It's almost 10 years since I started this site.
And, you know, I wonder what's going on.
You know, I'd be curious one day, there was this amazing thing in the New York Times where they used to do watching Serpico with Serpico, where they go, you know, find like Frank Serpico, sit down with him and watch the movie and have the conversation.
And, like, how interesting would it be to sit down now with Ross and watch Silk Road with him?
Even if he hated it or even if he argued, hey, this is not right or whatever, what a fascinating conversation that would be.
Yeah, basically at the end, he was going around reporting the police corruption that was kind of epidemic in the police department, according to him anyway.
And so eventually he goes to respond to a call, and he goes through the door, and he's the first through the door, and you're expecting your backup to be there to get your back.
And he goes through the door, and I think the door slams on his arm.
I think it was, as I recall, I don't remember all the details, but I think it was like small caliber, didn't, you know, cause any sort of significant cognitive damage.
You know, he ended up getting his detective shield when he's like lying in the hospital bed.
Yeah, well, the interesting thing when he called me was, he's like, I was never sad, and I love the movie, and Sidney Lumet's a genius, but he said, I didn't like the movie.
He's like, there was all sorts of stuff that didn't go into it, and he's like, I'd love to tell my version of this.
Well, that's why I'm imagining the, like, ten-part series of Serpico, where you go into the whole thing and the world and the culture.
And what a great part for somebody.
It'd be a fun one to do.
And while he's still alive and can contribute to… Would you do it in a dramatic way or would you do it in a documentary style?
Well, I think a dramatic version of it now because then you get the fun of like 1970s New York, like bygone era, you know, the city as it once was, you know?
Isn't it amazing how television used to be a place where people would go and their careers are falling apart and now it's the best way to tell a story?
It literally is the best.
Like when you look at...
Whether it's Netflix or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, some of the best drama that we've ever seen has been Ozark, rather.
There's no rule like you can only talk to these kind of people.
There's no rules.
Initially, if you looked at it on paper, it would have never made any sense.
Like, oh, you're going to sometimes be high as fuck talking to comedians, sometimes talk to scientists, sometimes talk to mixed martial arts fighters, sometimes talk to physicists, sometimes talk to doctors and nutritionists.
The fact that there's no one telling me what to do, that's what led me to it, was just interesting to me.
Like, I have a lot of interests.
I have varied interests.
If I had three different lives to live simultaneously, I could fill them up easy.
There's so many things that I would love to do that I just don't have the time to do.
So for me to talk to all sorts of different people from different walks of lives, different specialties and different disciplines that they're involved in, I'm just a student of humans.
I love the way people think and what they do and why they do it and what was going on while they're involved in something.
To me, that's ultimately incredibly fascinating.
So I just interviewed.
In the beginning, there was no stakes because nobody gave a fuck.
Nobody was listening.
So I was like, whoever I could get to talk to me was like, great.
I'm fully there with you because at the end of the day, and it's equally true of something like Silk Road or making a doc, at the end of the day, people are fascinating.
And if you will sit down and sort of Pay attention to them and ask them, hey man, what makes you tick?
Why did you do this?
That's where these interests – and it's a similar job in many ways, right?
Like me making a documentary is – I guess it's more polished and more produced and whatever.
But at the end of the day, it's that fundamental thing of like, hey, who's sitting across from me and what makes them tick?
Right, and the story of Michael Dowd, the way you depicted it in the 7-5 was so interesting because you get to see how this guy is a young, idealistic kid who becomes a cop, and then almost immediately, first day on the job, gets introduced to corruption.
Just full-scale corruption.
It was murder, right?
Like they threw somebody off a fucking balcony or something?
And what's so weird and fascinating about him is...
He's still, you know, as I was saying to you earlier, he served 10 and a half years in the federal pen.
And like being a cop in the federal pen and having to walk that yard alone, when I first met him, the story of how I got to him was fascinating.
So...
Once upon a time, these producers showed me this clip of him, and it was him being interviewed before the Mullen Commission.
And the guy asked him, do you consider yourself a New York City cop or a criminal?
And he leans over and he confers with his lawyer and he says, both.
And as soon as I saw that clip, I was like, dude, who is this guy?
And how do I get to him and how do I find his story?
And what I was using at the time was...
I have access to the software that the bounty hunters use.
So if I get your name, your date of birth, I can get this kind of crazy matrix of data that's everywhere you've picked up a piece of mail, everywhere any known associates of yours.
So I had gotten that for all these other people that were involved in the story.
And I started sending out FedExes all over the country, right?
So it was like, dude, I'm making this movie.
Everybody else is already in it.
If you want to say your piece, I'll meet you for, you know, a beer or lunch or whatever.
Anytime, anyplace, I'll be there.
And it was complete bullshit.
I didn't have anybody else at all.
But I sent them all over, you know, hundreds of FedExes all over the country.
So people started calling and they're like, yo, is Mikey hip to this?
Is Mikey blessed this?
And I could not find out anywhere, right?
Try as I might.
And I'm looking through the data and I'm like, where the hell is this guy?
Because he had fallen into the crack of right when the digital era had begun.
So there was no digital footprint for the guy.
And so there were no known addresses.
There were some known associates, but everybody's like, no, Dow's not here.
And then eventually there was this one name on there, and it was a woman doctor.
And I picked up the phone, and I called, and I thought, like, what the hell?
What's the likelihood she does this?
And she answers the phone, and I said, yeah, was Mikey there?
And she puts him on.
And Dow is like...
Yeah, this is Michael Dowd.
What do you want?
And I told him the same thing.
I said, dude, you pick the time and place.
Anywhere in America, I'll be there.
And if you think I'm full of shit, if you think I'm not the guy to tell your story, then you walk away.
And he said, all right, tomorrow.
Meet me on Long Island.
And I'm in L.A. or whatever at the time.
So I jump on a plane, fly out there, and I go out and get on the L.I.E., and I'm going out to Hop Hog, wherever it was.
I don't even remember at this point.
And I go to get off the train station.
You know, you go to get off at whatever stop he tells me.
And I get off, and he says, now get back on the train.
And he makes me go up to the next location, controlling the meat, you know, as cops do.
It's like a drug deal.
You know, you're controlling the meat, the circumstances or whatever.
He makes me go to the next station and I get off and he rolls up and I get in his car and he's just this full tilt maniac right out of a Scorsese movie.
And he's like, alright, so what's the plan?
What do you want to do?
And I'm like, dude, I want to know what it's like to be a corrupt cop where you're snorting lines off the dashboard and ripping and robbing through East New York.
Ben Stiller in talks to direct Crooked Cop movie, The 7-5 for MGM. Well, how are they going to call it the 7-5 when you have a documentary called the 7-5?
Okay, let me rewind, because the top of this was bonkers.
So, at the time, some narc I know calls me and is like, dude, you want to hear the craziest drug war story ever?
There's this Russian gangster, his name is Tarzan, he used to run his operation out of a titty bar in Miami, named after his favorite movie, Porky's, and he's locked up in a Panamanian prison, and he's got a Blackberry, do you want the number?
So I fly to Panama and I've got like 10 grand – no, just under 10 grand because if it's 10 grand, it's illegal.
But if it's less than 10 grand, you can bring it, right?
Because I know I'm going to have to like peel off bribes to get in the prison or whatever.
And he's got this Russian attorney at the time.
And the Russian attorney is like, okay, meet me outside of this prison, La Jolla prison outside of – hour and a half outside of Panama City.
So I go out there, dude.
And you remember like – Field of dreams.
This is like the inverse of that, dude, like field of nightmares, okay, this like stone fortress carved out of the jungle.
And I roll up on this place, and there's this attorney, and he's standing out front, and I'm like, pay him a thousand bucks, and he's going to smuggle me into the prison or whatever.
He's Panamanian, because he lives in Panama, right?
But he speaks Russian and whatever.
And he's like, you give me $500, I'm gonna give $100 to the guard, the guard's gonna open it up, and you just go running across the yard.
And when you get to the other side of the lower yard, there's gonna be a big steel door, and you push it open, and Tarzan's gonna be on the other side.
And so I meet him and I'm like, dude, tell me the story.
And he's like, I can't tell you the story because when you were sending me emails on the Blackberry, Russian intelligence intercepted it and they called the Russian mafia and they said, if I talk to you, they're going to kill me.
And I'm like, bro, I just smuggled myself into a Panamanian prison.
Like, you're going to tell me the fucking story.
And so we kind of get into it in this prison.
Stupidly.
I mean, this guy could like squash me like a bug, you know.
But I'm like pissed off because I've like come this far or whatever.
I'm flying back to LA. I'm going to get my 300, you know, thread count sheets and go to sleep for the night.
And your ass is going to die in this Panamanian prison.
And you're a damn fool for not telling me this story because I'm going to get your thing out.
And he's like, you know, tells me to piss off or whatever.
Many years go by.
So you leave.
So I leave.
And he won't tell me.
So years go by, right?
And then I'm out promoting the 7-5 when the 7-5 comes out.
And I get an email that says, jailbreak, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.
I open the email, and I'm like, what is this?
And he's like, I escaped from Panama, I traveled to Cuba, and I catch boat, and now I'm back in Russia.
If you will come to Russia and meet me in Moscow, now I will tell you the story.
So I call my producers from the 7-5, and I'm like...
Bro, can you get a million bucks in a week?
Because I got like five weeks off.
Tarzan's ready to tell the story.
He's like, let me make a call.
Eli Holtzman makes a phone call and he calls me back.
He's like, alright dude, I got the money.
Dice are hot.
Go.
So I fly to Moscow with the crew and show up and he starts telling the story.
So what the story is, is it's the story of three best friends.
It's him, Tarzan.
It's his best friend Juan Almeida, who's like Miami playboy, car dealer, sells exotic boats, whatever.
And a third guy, who's this Cuban narco.
And what these guys have done is they have sold a submarine to the Kali drug cartel for $20 million.
It all got busted.
So they end up in federal pens and whatever else.
And I'm like, so what is the true story?
So I'm sitting there and I'm shooting with Tarzan in Moscow.
And one of the guys has been a federal fugitive his entire life.
Fed's been looking for this guy for like 30 years.
That's the Cuban narco.
And he's been flying around the world, sending postcards to the U.S. Marshals.
Like, haha, you're never going to catch me, right?
And this guy spends $100,000 a month on getting new identities, real documents.
That's like operating costs.
So he's getting new passports and whatever so he can stay ahead of him.
And what he'll do is, as he's traveling around the world, I get on a plane.
I sit down next to you.
Who are you?
Are you Joe Rogan?
Good to meet you, whatever.
And this is pre-internet days.
So then he takes his passport, he goes into the bathroom in the thing, changes the name to Joe Rogan, His passport.
Make sure that I'm ahead of you when I walk out so that I enter the country.
I got on as Tony Yester.
When I get out on the other side, I'm Joe Rogan.
I'm in the line ahead of you.
So I've changed identities on the plane anytime he goes anywhere.
And then you get jammed up because they're like, no, dude, Joe Rogan, he just entered a few minutes ago.
So this guy, nobody could ever find this guy, right?
So I keep asking everybody, like, Can I find, like Tony Yester, will this guy talk to us?
And they're like, bro, never in a million years is this guy going to talk to you.
So I'm sitting there in Moscow, and I get a text on WhatsApp.
And it says, you've talked to the waiters.
If you want to know what really happened to the submarine, come talk to the chef.
Meet me in Africa tomorrow for a cup of coffee, and I'll tell you the rest of the story.
No shit.
So I get on the phone.
I'm in Moscow, Four Seasons or whatever.
I call the producers and I'm like, change of plans.
I'm going to Africa and they're like, are you out of your mind, bro?
And I'm like, listen, have 20 grand in cash when I get there because we're going to have to creep around, pay people off.
I don't know what the deal is.
Fly to Africa.
When I get into Africa, I walk into the lobby of this Hotel.
And I walk in, and it's like thick-necked MMA fighter-looking dudes, right?
Like wearing Armani suits and stuff, but these are not like business travelers.
You know, this is like a crew.
And I'm like, this looks a little gnarly.
Walk up into my room, and I walk into the hotel room.
And as soon as I walk in, the phone rings.
I pick it up, and the voice says, downstairs, five minutes, Porsche Cayenne.
And I'm like, holy shit, this is the dude.
So I take my location on the iPhone and I share it with, you know, producers, cameraman or whatever.
Like, dude, if I disappear, like, go to where the last place you saw the dot.
So I walk downstairs.
And I go out, up rolls Porsche Cayenne.
Here's this international fugitive.
Door swings open.
I get in the car.
This guy goes ripping ass out of there at like 100 miles an hour.
And as he's ripping along on the like Autobahn or whatever it is, yanks the e-brake, slams the car over to the side of the road, slaps me on the chest, and he's like, brother, you better be who you say you are, and this better be what you say it is, or we got a problem.
It's like Sean Penn goes to interview El Chapo and El Chapo gets pinched afterwards.
You know what I mean?
So it's making sure it's not one of those kind of operations.
So I end up spending a week with this dude and eventually he takes me to this hidden airplane hangar outside of the city and he opens it up and inside is a MiG fighter jet with $20 million in cash in the cockpit.
And he's like, here's the deal.
I'm a pilot.
That's my bailout plane and that's my goat bag.
You understand how this works?
And I'm like, I think so.
So he proceeds and then he takes me into his like G5 or whatever it is and he proceeds to tell me the story of what really happened with the 20 million dollars in the submarine.
So suddenly everything that once upon a time was owned by the state, like if you're the general and you like work at the airfield or at the place where the tanks are and suddenly there is no government, like you own those tanks.
You own that airfield.
So basically suddenly everything was for sale and these guys were these like rock'em sock'em cowboy dudes that were like flying to Russia in the early days and being like, So is it possible?
And they buy – first they buy choppers for the Kali cartel, right?
They get like – so it's got a hook on it and it can pick up 5,000 kilos.
So they're dropping the dope out to the cigarette boats from the jungle labs and they do it successfully.
And so eventually the drug lords come to them and they're like, choppers are great, bro.
Like can we get a submarine?
Because, you know, you pack it full of submarine, you think about it, even if the submarine costs 20, 30 million dollars, one trip where it's packed with 5,000 kilos or whatever it is, you paid the whole thing off and made a profit.
So these three guys get together and they're like, absolutely, we can get you the submarine.
Only, like, two of them are, like, you know, really trying to get the submarine done.
And they go and they shop, and there's pictures of them in the documentary.
Like, you'll see them.
They're, like, shopping for a submarine, like you're shopping for shoes at Ross Dress for Less, right?
And so that's the weird thing about the job, where you're like, Okay, I'm sitting there, and you're telling me the weirdest, most precious shit in your life, and yet it's going to be broadcast around the world.
So now all those guys have gotten pinched, and they do the documentary.
Eventually they all get busted for one thing or another.
So I grew up in Dallas, and my dad was in the DA's office that was depicted in Errol Morris' movie, The Thin Blue Line, right?
So I grew up knocking around with, like, cops and prosecutors and crooks and whatever, and my dad would kind of drag me around to the, you know, to the courthouse, to the jail, to whatever, and I think his idea was, like, that I would be scared straight and not, you know, and instead I just, like, imprinted like a duck.
Years later, I'm not qualified to do anything, whatever.
But I end up kind of talking my way into a job at a newspaper.
And I'm like, look, I can hang out with cops and I can hang out with crooks.
And I'm like, I don't scare easy.
So let me write the crime beat.
So I start doing that.
And then eventually, weirdly enough, I cross paths with Errol Morris again.
He wouldn't even remember this.
For him, it's just another night on the tour.
And I'm like, walk-on part.
But I end up getting an interview with him to do the...
You know, to do a profile of him in the newspaper.
And he's like, dude, I'm so tired of these interviews.
You want to just go get a steak and a bottle of wine?
And I'm like, dude, there's nothing in the world more I want to do than sit down with Errol Morris and get a steak and a bottle of wine.
So we go up and have this, like, fantastic evening together.
And at the end of it, he reaches over and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, you're either going to spend the rest of your life writing about people like me or you're going to go try your hand at this.
And I literally called the newspaper the next day and I was like, I quit.
You know?
And so then I just started like, you know, kind of, you know, knocking around.
And then so then it became like, okay, these crime stories, you know, these, you know, once I do the 7-5 Operation Odessa, then like the crooks start finding me or the cops start finding me.
Isn't the Night Stalker at least slightly different because you're dealing with this rare aberration in human psychology where someone enjoys killing people?
Someone gets a thrill out of other people's fear and pain because that was one of the things you talked about in the Night Stalker that he would get off on seeing the people terrified.
It's not like it's really all the same thing, but it's all related in some way or another.
The thing about the Night Stalker was, I guess what happened with that is...
I'm writing on a TV show at the time, and one of the other writers, Tim Walsh, buddy of mine, comes in and he's like, dude, I just sat down with the guy that worked the Night Stalker case, this like murder cop, and he's like, fascinating, and I think there's a documentary here.
You want to go to dinner with this guy?
And so my answer is always like, yes.
Like, I want the Blackberry number, and I want to go to dinner.
Like, if there's a lunatic out there, like, then I want to go.
Also, the way they figured out how to do it, where they made like a sniper's den inside the back of a car, so he could lay down and shoot out the back trunk.
And then just get in the front seat and drive away, and no one would ever suspect.
When there was this whole kind of, like, it sounds weird to say, but like Lolita-like element to it, where it's like older dude manipulating younger person, traveling around the country doing it, you know, traveling around D.C. anyway, doing it.
Well, part of that is, and that's one of the things that I was trying to explore in the Night Stalker, is there's this weird relationship between the media and the cops, right?
And everybody's trying to do their job.
Nobody's doing anything wrong.
But from the media's perspective, it's, hey, we have to get the word out.
If there's a predator that's out hunting people in the city, then the city has a right to know, and the citizens have a right to know.
But from the cop's perspective, it's like, hey, if you're broadcasting key pieces of information, and in the case of the Night Stalker, the Night Stalker was clocking everything that showed up in the media and was changing his patterns based on that.
Right?
And so once somebody had called 911, he was cutting phone cords.
Once they found out that he was wearing his notorious Avia shoe print, and once that was made public in San Francisco, suddenly he threw the shoes away.
And so the one clue that's tying him to all those things.
And so there's this weird unholy connection between cops, media, killer that everybody's in some way participating in kind of stepping on each other trying to do the work.
I mean the technology between phones and street cams and whatever else, it would be much harder to do it or the methodology would have to be different.
And so that was a big thing for me in doing the Night Stalker was...
That story had this weird aftermath where suddenly when Ramirez is brought into court and paraded in front of the cameras, he becomes like the Jim Morrison of serial killers.
Here's this guy in the sunglasses and the long hair and whatever, and he gets all those groupies.
And so very early on with that, I was like, man, I don't want to be glorifying this guy.
This is somebody that's out.
Not only is he doing these murders, but he's also like kidnapping and abusing children.
And people don't know that piece of the story.
So, like, this isn't about the psychology of Richard Ramirez.
This is about, you know, these two cops and the victims and the weird people that have kind of brushes with the beast.
And again, you know, some people criticize it, some people don't, because it's like, okay, tell me more about Richard Ramirez.
Like, no, man, like, you don't, like, what's interesting to me is the human story.
It's what you said, where it's like...
I want to sit across from people and know what makes them tick.
What's it like to be a murder cop that long, hot, harrowing summer?
What's it like to lose a family member?
What's it like to be a kid who's kidnapped by Richard Ramirez and then survive and live your whole life?
So that was, you know, at the end of the day, all you have is, you know, I fly by such lights as they're given me, you know, and so that felt like the right way to tell the story.
I didn't want to glorify him because it's like it's that celebritization culture where suddenly like if you're famous, you're famous and you've got like fans and groupies.
Well, I didn't want to fall into that crap with Ramirez.
Because it exists already anyway.
And yes, I'm curious, like, what is it that makes somebody like that do what they do?
And this stuff is not in, you know, obviously not in the Netflix series.
Some of it we're doing a sort of after the doc podcast thing on.
Some of it we're going to hopefully remake it as a narrative series.
But like...
What happened was he's in El Paso.
His father is a cop and would drag him to the graveyard at night and like chain him up in the graveyard.
And so he was abused and sort of messed with in a fundamental way as a kid.
And then he's got supposedly this cousin, Cousin Mike, who was a Vietnam vet and He participated in butchery, My Lai-style massacres and whatever in Vietnam, took photos of it, murders and whatever, and came home and showed young Richard Ramirez these photos and supposedly trained him on how to kill in a particular way, combat style training with a knife and whatever else.
So he gets, like, you know, he's abused.
He's sexually molested.
He's locked up in the graveyard.
He's got this psycho cousin.
And all of this becomes this crazy cocktail.
He's a thief.
They call him Five Finger Richie.
And then eventually he washes up in L.A. And he's shooting dope.
And he's out of his mind and begins to get a taste for it.
You know, it's the...
For him, it was when I see the fear in your eyes, when you flinch, that's what gave him the sexual charge.
And so he starts doing this and just ripping and marauding his way through Los Angeles.
But I didn't want the series to be like a platform for that, for his justifying or explaining it in some way or another.
And that's why I guess I was trying to articulate before, which is all these things have these like major moral questions where it's like, okay, if I'm making a series that's about Richard Ramirez and suddenly this guy's face is on a poster, even if I don't put him in the show, you know, until episode four or whatever, am I contributing to that?
Mythos and that celebritization of this guy.
And so constantly you're asking yourself, like, I'm fascinated by this story.
I want to share this story, but I don't want it to be cheap.
I don't want it to be exploitative.
I don't want it to be...
I want it to be thoughtless.
I want it to be complicated and nuanced.
And so as we make them, we're watching, re-watching, ah, changing this.
I don't like...
This is maybe...
This is too gruesome.
This is too glorifying.
And with the crime scene photos, that was another question where it's like...
It's rough to look at those.
I mean I had hundreds if not thousands of these crime scene photos of the actual crime scene photographer walking around after these murders taking pictures of the aftermath of it and it's really hard to look at.
You don't wipe that stuff out of your consciousness once you see it.
And so then the question becomes Okay, do you show people this so that they understand this is what it really looks like?
And it's horrifying.
So there is no glorifying this.
This is what a real murder photo looks like.
But you don't want that to be cheap and exploitative where you're getting eyeballs just by being gruesome.
So there's a ton of moral questions in all of them.
So when you prepare for something like this, when you know you're going to write an outline or you're going to sit down and create a series on something that's historical but really disturbing and very fucked up, do you sit alone by yourself and write out your thoughts?
How do you decide how you're going to lay something like this out?
Do you have a vision and ultimately did the vision morph over time or did you kind of create what you set out to create?
It's like a little spark at the beginning where I don't know – I'm not sure why I'm fascinated, but for some reason I'm fascinated with Ross Ulbricht or for some reason I'm fascinated with the murder cop in The Night Stalker or for some reason I'm fascinated with Michael Dowd.
And I don't know where the story is going to go, but I know something in me wants to dig in deeper.
So some amount of time is just kind of sitting by yourself and kind of getting right with, okay, what do I want to say?
Why does this matter?
How do I do it?
And then I have a wonderful group of people that I work with year in, year out all the time, have on all these films for many years.
And I'm a believer in surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and better than you at what they do and talk it through.
Pitch it out.
Say, this is what I'm thinking.
What about this?
Poke holes in it.
Make it better.
And so then that happens and then at a certain point it's kind of like now everybody go away again and like let me think like, okay, what was that little spark that started this?
How do I stay true to that?
And then always the story ends up taking a turn at some point.
Like if you end up in a straight line from where you started, then I think you didn't learn anything.
And the whole point I'm doing it is so that I will learn something along the way.
So when there's some weird left field thing and I'm like, okay, I don't know why, but I have to go there.
I always trust that instinct to go there and take the story wherever it takes me.
Was there any dispute amongst the people that you – that are your confidants, the people that you do work with about how to handle this or what to cover?
Basically, if you ask five people to tell the story of what happened at a dinner, all five people are going to tell you a completely different version of what happened.
And so there's that layer of dispute because it never lines up.
There's always discrepancies and there's always conflict.
So at a certain point, then you're making decision, okay, which version of this story am I going to tell?
Joe tells the top half of what it was like when we met at this podcast.
At a certain point, I tell my experience of it.
And then there's the symphony of collaborators that are around you.
And somebody's like, man, that's cheap and grotesque.
I don't know, you know, you're going too far with those murder photos.
Somebody else is like, if you don't show those murder photos, then people can glorify this guy and think that it's exactly sticking people's nose in the horror of it that make it repugnant.
So then it's like you're hearing all these conflicting, contrasting points of view.
Weird story.
I was knocking around with Gary Busey once upon a time.
But you also have to be the guy who directs it in the direction that you think it should go if you think it's being led astray by all those other pieces of the wheel.
It's an incredible story, which also, again, each of these stories, in some way or another, is like, it's a history of America, told through a couple of people's voices and experience.
So I don't know what exactly that's going to be, but I know, like, yes, Snoop, I'm in, man.
There's a story that happened yesterday, or the day before, of him, he was playing a video game, and apparently he got pissed off and stormed out of the video game, like...
Streaming it online and kept the stream running for seven and a half hours before he realized that the stream was still running.
Pretty much, you know, whether it's Serpico or whether it's Snoop or, you know, I got this call one time, and this unfortunately hasn't, it couldn't happen, but I get this call one time from this guy called Chaz Williams, and he's like, man, I'm the greatest bank robber in American history.
And, like, you're the only guy that can tell my story.
And I'm like, let's go to lunch.
So we go to, like, Soho House in Malibu or whatever.
And I said, so what's your story, man?
And he's like, let me tell you something.
Jesse James robbed 12 trains, robbed 12 banks, and three of them were trains.
And he goes through the history of, like, famous bank robbers we know.
He's like, man, I robbed 60 banks, 15 of them, while I was in prison.
I'm like, come again?
I'm like, what do you mean, while you were in prison?
He's like, I'm in prison in Milan, Michigan or whatever at the time, locked up for bank robbery.
And they start to have a work release program.
And so I'm locked up in the hole and I get hold of the like newsletter that the guards are passing around and it says, you know, work study release where if you enroll in college, you're an inmate, you can get a day pass to go attend college.
So they start this, like, he and his crew start this, like, three-year-long con to be on good behavior so that they can get work release.
You know, that is to say, you're locked up in prison for five years, but you're coming out to get a study, whatever, you know, English literature.
And so you go out during the day, you get bussed out of the prison, you go to the college, you come back at night.
And it's these, like, sort of sexy, badass, black bank robbers.
And it's, like, kind of young, do-gooder, liberal, like, white girls that are trying to, like, get them out on their work release, right?
And so he's like, so basically, we start doing this.
And I'm like, okay, so they drop us off at school.
And as soon as they drop us off at school, we slip out the back.
We go rob banks during the day.
We take the money.
We get a stash house.
We get girlfriends.
We get jewelry.
We get whatever.
We're back by 5 o'clock in pickup.
We go back into the penitentiary at night.
We spend the night in the joint.
And we start robbing banks.
And the FBI is looking at this and they're like, man, this has got to be Chaz Williams.
But it can't be Chaz Williams because Chaz Williams locked up for bank robbery.
How can he be doing these?
And so they had run all of these bank robberies for a while and they had their master plan where they were going – they'd save the stash, all the cash that they had made in apartments and guns and all the tools of the trade.
And they were going to buy a nightclub and it was going to be – I forget the name, some amazing name for the nightclub.
I forget the name of it.
But it was going to be when they got released, they'd take all the money from the bank robberies and open their nightclub.
And then, as always happens, one of the crew ends up getting busted, rats him out, and literally right before they're supposed to get out and, you know, in the final job, they all get taken down.
And so we started to develop this together.
I was like, man, this is an amazing, like, what a crime story, you know?
And so developing it...
Because a lot of this is about trust, right?
You're getting people to tell you these stories that kind of shouldn't be told in some way or another.
And so in this case, I was like, listen, I'm going to send you a question.
I'm going to write a voice memo, speak a voice memo, and I'm going to send it to you at night.
And just like, I'm going to ask you questions I'm curious.
Like, what's it like to be like black in America?
What's it like to, you know, why do you decide to rob your first bank?
How old are you?
Whatever the questions are.
Whatever you want to say, nothing's off limits.
Anything you want to say.
And so he would then record all these voice memos of telling me the story of his life and how he got...
You know, radicalized from his father goes off and serves in World War II and is a war hero and comes home and then they go into the South and he starts walking into, you know, places, whatever, and people are calling him boy.
And he's like, and as soon as I heard somebody calling my dad boy, I was like, fuck Uncle Sam, man.
American dream, I'm gonna steal mine.
And in that moment, I decide I'm gonna become a bank robber and get my piece of the American dream.
So I'm like, this is an amazing story, right?
And then right as we go out to do it, he ends up going to see his son in Florida and drops dead after an airplane trip.
He did a number of years, but he got out and sort of, you know, started the whole, started in the game, like broke 50 Cent and sort of became a promoter and like, you know, had Foxy Brown and this whole kind of second act because he had the ultimate street cred as the world's greatest bank robber for the hip-hop crowd.
That wouldn't be a bad podcast if you could do it like, you know, Wandry does those like really detailed podcasts with great editing and, you know, that tell stories.
Like, have you ever heard the one on Aaron Hernandez?
And it's so interesting how, you know, and like you were so at the forefront of this where...
The world kind of caught up with the podcast thing, but it's amazing those long-form stories where people want to be told an amazing story by somebody that really knows it and kind of cares about it and will tell it Lovingly.
It's like this show, right?
What you do is you're curious to meet people.
So you sit down with, okay, who do I want to know?
And like what makes them tick?
And I think why people hook into you is the same reason that why people hook into the Aaron Hernandez thing.
Because it's like, give me a fascinating character who I don't quite know what's going to come out of his mouth.
And let him tell me a story.
Show me your curiosity and fascination about something.
And this is probably what's responsible for a lot of his behavior.
And also abuse and also, you know, a lot of other shit that factors in there.
But, you know, football players...
Fighters, boxers, anybody, soldiers, people have experienced massive impacts and shocks.
What that does to the mind is just irreparable, or if not irreparable, like some serious fucking damage that needs real care and understanding and cutting-edge medical assistance to try to help with.
Who's like this guy who was a railroad worker and was this very kind of responsible, squared away guy and was going around and was, you know, tamping dynamite and the railroad ties.
And at some point one explodes and it drives a railroad tie through his head all the way through his brain, frontal cortex or whatever.
And I always thought that there was an amazing movie in him where it's The Life and Deaths of Gary Busey.
So when he first started out his life, and it's been a while since I've thought about this, but he was the drummer for Leon Russell, and Leon Russell's first record is credited as like Teddy Jacketti.
Which was actually like Gary Busey.
So Busey has these crazy different lives that he lives.
And then there's eventually the motorcycle accident.
And he's pronounced clinically dead several times over the course of his life.
So I close the door behind me and I go in and I go out to the balcony and he's like, and he's pointing out, he's like, there's a fire.
You see the smoke?
You see the smoke?
There's a fire in the Malibu Hills.
What do you think we should do about it?
I'm like, we're not firemen.
I don't think we should do anything.
Let's leave it to the professionals.
And he's like, no, we got to go investigate this.
This could be a problem.
Get in the car.
So we run out and he jumps into his car, his Mercedes, like black Mercedes, you know, just beat to shit like the house.
And he's driving.
Completely naked, you know, other than the robe, holding the shotgun, wearing the moccasins.
And as we're driving, he's driving on the left side of the road, like cars coming at us and shit, you know, and he's like, all right, pitch me the movie.
What do you want to do?
As we're like driving up to the fire.
And I'm like, you know, trying to like pitch him the movie.
But because of that, we end up kind of knocking around together for a minute.
And so we end up, you know, shooting a short film or something together and then eventually he calls me up and he's like, I gotta move out of the house.
You know, can I move in with you and the kids?
And I'm like, I don't think that's gonna work, man.
The problem is, after the motorcycle accident, everything's real squirrely.
It's hard to understand.
I spoke with him on the phone once, because Alex Jones was hanging out with him, and Alex Jones called me up.
He goes, Joe, Gary Busey wants to talk to you.
I go, what?
And he puts Gary Busey on.
And I didn't talk to Gary Busey.
Gary Busey talked at me.
And this long thing about the universe and about life and death and the spirits and entanglement with the cosmos and this crazy, long, run-on sentence.
Roseanne Barr, a student, walking across the street, someone's driving, they can't see because of the sunlight and the windshield, hit her in traffic, 15 years old.
She spends the next nine months in a mental health institute.
She gets locked up in an asylum.
Yeah.
Can't count anymore.
Was a straight-A student in math.
Now can't count.
Like, her brain's completely frazzled and becomes this wild, crazy, impulsive comic, much like Kinison, you know?
And those two are, in my money, for my money, they're in the top 20 of the greatest stand-ups of all time.
It's a different kind of vulnerability though because like it's one thing with like with the physical there is okay it's a scrap or it's a gunfight or it's a whatever.
When you're walking into a room and you're just having to like capture people's imagination… That's an amazing thing.
That's voodoo, dude.
That's something coming out of somebody to be able to do that.
I don't know if he rehearsed it, but he certainly memorized it.
He had a monologue.
Like, Carlin would essentially write out his thoughts on things and, you know, some of the best writing, really, in terms of, like, social commentary.
To this day, people are handing out clips of Carlin talking about some of the shit that's going down right now in our culture.
But he had his way of doing it.
And then there's some guys that just write completely on stage.
They just have ideas and they go and flush them out on stage and then they keep going up.
They go up in different clubs and they flush it out further.
And they don't write anything down.
They do it sort of like Jay-Z does rap.
Jay-Z doesn't write any of his lyrics down.
He just memorizes them.
He makes them up memorizes them just keeps doing it until he gets it down But everything's in his head and then this guy's like Nas who you read his rap and it's like it's clear This guy's writing this stuff like right.
It's so well crafted and the words go together So well the idea that this guy could just improvise this is kind of preposterous You know, it's everybody has a different way of doing it, but But how often, like, when you're going in unrehearsed, improvisational like that, is it a bust?
But what I do do is I listen to recordings of old sets, not old, like last week or last night or whatever, or I listen on the way home, and I do write.
And when I write, I write in total silence.
I just write, just me sitting in front of a laptop, just writing.
And then I have other ideas that I don't even have written down.
I just have a thought and it popped into my head.
I remember when Harvey Weinstein first got busted.
I remember right away thinking that this is so fucked up.
Especially because I have daughters, and if I ever found out that some fucking guy offered my daughter sex, some disgusting guy like Harvey Weinstein offered my daughter sex for a role, I would want to fuck him up.
But if Harvina Weinstein came to my son with a solid contract, I'd be like, dude, you're gonna be Batman.
And I went on stage with that idea, you know?
And I just ran with it.
I went on stage literally the day he got arrested.
Or the day, you know, the story broke and he was in trouble.
Whatever the fuck happened to him.
I don't remember how it all went down.
But that day, I went on stage with it, thinking about it.
And also, it's one of the best ways to add on to bits, because as you're listening to a bit, when you don't have to say it, and you're not writing it, as you're listening to it being performed in front of an audience, New ideas will pop in your head.
Like, oh, but what about...
I could say this.
Or maybe I could take it that way.
It's like the amount of...
There's no substitute for actually performing, for doing sets.
But I think listening to a set is worth about 40% of doing a set.
That's not the type of person who sits down and disciplines himself.
So it's like you have to kind of be a hybrid.
You have to be a hybrid of someone who's disciplined just to squeeze the most out.
You don't have to.
Guys have gotten really far by never writing a goddamn thing down and never listening to a goddamn single set.
They just perform enough and they get into the flow.
And there's actually a school of thought, and it's a good school of thought, that maybe that's the best way to do it, just perform all the time and don't write anything down.
Just perform almost every night of the week.
That way it's just you're never out of shape.
It's always burned in your mind.
But I come from this school of thoughts of, like, with martial arts.
Martial arts, you can, like, with jujitsu.
Jujitsu's a good example.
You learn techniques, and then you go apply them when you spar.
But if you drill, you get way better, meaning you practice scenarios over and over again.
Like if we were drilling an arm bar, I would put you in my guard, I would grab the back of your head, I would pinch down your forearm, shift my hips, catch the arm bar.
And you would tap, and then I would do it over and over and over and over again.
And then you would do it to me over and over and over and over again.
You're just doing it, and you get better by doing it.
And a lot of guys do just get really good just by doing it.
But the guys that get really, really good, those guys review videos, they go over techniques, they drill constantly, and they put themselves in bad situations.
But that's the discipline and craft, I think, of anything, right?
You can kind of wing it, you can improvise it, you can do the fun stuff, or you can sit there and like the grinders in any discipline, whether you're writing a screenplay, whether you're rolling jujitsu, it's like the grinders and taking the time to do that.
That's what gives you the level of Polish and precision.
Somebody, somewhere somebody had told me that you, or maybe it was on one of your shows, that you've kind of set up your life that many of the distractions are out of the way so that you can just come in and do this or do the comedy or, you know, so that it's, you have total focus and your time is not spent too long.
Chasing bullshit.
Is that true?
I mean, how much have you got your operation dialed at this point so that you're just doing what you do all the time?
But sometimes you can with someone that you know really well.
And you're doing this...
Like I did one recently with my friend Ari.
And I've known him forever.
We're so close.
It's easy.
I can talk to him.
We just know each other.
It's easy to do.
But for most of the time, they're like, you talk, I talk.
You talk, I talk.
It's just...
It doesn't feel good.
Even when I watch them, unless the person is talking about something really riveting, where all I'm trying to do is just get questions, throw them to questions, and then listen to their response.
I have obligations in terms of there's some information that I think I should probably cover and some things I should probably try to get them to talk about.
There's subjects that I think if I could get to that point, it would be cool because I think that's a pretty interesting topic.
But for the most part, it's just you let it play out.
And it's one of those things, if you've been doing it long enough, you kind of get a sense while you're doing it of whether or not this is interesting or whether or not you're overbearing.
It's taught me a lot about communication.
It's taught me a lot about...
How to hold a conversation, you know, and when you're being overbearing and when you're talking over people and how often people do that.
How did you decide, how did you lock into the format that this has become and at what point, how much of it is deliberate and how much of it is you intuiting it and improvising and feeling your way?
Okay, so fascinating how this applies to documentaries is, you know, people ask me, like, oh, how does the documentary thing work?
And how it works is, as a director, really a lot of directing is long before you ever end up on set, long before you ever end up with a camera, there has to be this level of trust where, like, the person understands, hey, this person really gives a shit about my story and is really going to go to the end of the earth to tell this right.
And then, on top of it, it's not, with documentaries, documentaries need a performance too.
It's not just like, here's the facts of the story.
It's, you gotta horse whisper people into like, okay, I'm ready.
I mean, when I'm sitting there with Tarzan in Moscow, he's like, I'm not ready to be telling this story right now.
We're needing to be drinking a little bit of vodka.
And so you recognize, okay, now's not the time to roll, because I can't force this.
It's maneuver this Such that by the time you are ready, you're ready to pop and you're ready to tell these stories that you've been holding on to most of your life that maybe you should or maybe you shouldn't tell.
But there's a real art to getting that person to the place where they're ready to sort of crack open and reveal what's in the middle.
And I've always thought about it that way, which is when I'm knocking around as a crime reporter in Berkeley or Oakland once upon a time, what I'm thinking is, yeah, I'm writing stories, I'm getting a job, I'm getting a paycheck, but really I'm gathering material.
I'm listening to the way...
Cops talk in the precinct and what the rhythm is and what the bullshit and where the hustle is or what it's like when somebody's in jail and what the noises are so that as I sit down as a writer, I'm drawing on real authentic stuff.
So they like completely cross pollinate with one another.
You know?
And then, so that when I, by the time I sit down to write Silk Road, and I know, okay, Jason Clarke's character, I'm gonna composite two different people here, but I've spent a lot of time knocking around with narcs, and I know how they treat informants, and I know, you know, the dynamic between Daryl Britt Gibson and Jason Clarke when these guys are breaking each other's balls, and it's like, you know, a little bit, you know, weird power dynamics.
Like, I know those guys.
I've spent time with them.
And also, as the actors were like, man, what's it like to be a corrupt cop?
I'm like, well, let's get Michael Dowd on the phone because he can tell us.
You know what I mean?
And literally, I would just fold those guys in and be like, hey, we're making this movie.
I want your help.
Tell these guys whatever you can gain.
And with smart actors, you put them in that position and they'll steal the little materials.
Like at the time that I was making Silk Road, it was this crazy experience because I had three projects that were going simultaneously.
I was doing Night Stalker for Netflix.
I was doing The Last Narc about the Kiki Camarena murder in 1985. And I was doing Silk Road at the same time.
And I thought, man, how am I going to survive this?
This is so complicated.
I'm juggling so much at any given time.
And it was what you said, where it was like, okay, I'm locked in right now.
Right now I'm looking at this edit, and I've got 45 minutes, and I know I need to walk out of this room and tell the editor, tweak this, tweak this.
This joke's not working.
This needs to be more dramatic and change the music cue.
And I don't have time to do anything else, so I know the trains have to leave the station.
And so what I had was, with The Last Narc, I had this amazing character in Hector Boreas, who was this old-school Jurassic Narc, door-kicker, gunfighter dude who was down there in Mexico working the Camarena murder for many years.
And then I had Jason Clarke, who was going to be playing a DEA guy.
And I was like, you know what I need to do?
do?
These two cats need to get a taco together." And so I was like, "Jason, I want you to meet this guy." And I was like, "I don't need to be there.
I don't want to be in the middle of it.
You guys go sit down and go get a taco in Riverside or whatever." And what Jason Clarke did was he went, spent the time with Hector, and they like swapped war stories, The Last Narc and Silk Road as they're prepping.
And then when I got on set eventually with Jason Clarke, I looked down and he's got this belt buckle and it's Hector's belt And I'm like, that son of a bitch, dude.
That's so smart.
He stole that from Hector because that's like a street thing.
Whereas, you know, I'm the rooster, man.
You know, and he had that on his buckle.
And I thought, that's a really smart, that's a smart actor, you know?
I mean, I remember, like, in seeing Dylan being interviewed, I think it was by Barbara Walters or something, and she's asking him, you know, like, how do you write this?
He's like, I don't write them songs, they just fall down from the sky, you know?
And so there's a thing where it's like, you are making yourself available to, and that's by showing up and doing the work.
Like, if you look at any of those Bob Dylan documentaries, man, he's always sitting there behind a typewriter, writing songs, writing You know, however old he is right now, writing some of the most amazing stuff of his career.
And that's because he's a worker and a grinder, so that when you're doing that, then it can come down, right?
Well, and it is a product of, you know, any measure of success, it's that little whisper of, like, man, there's some wind in my sails.
So, like, and in a weird way, I feel like I haven't even started working yet.
Like, I'm just now starting to figure out, like, hey, like, I'm starting to know how to do this, and I'm starting to really, like, now I want to do something interesting.
Well, some people, there's a certain point in time where they lose energy.
And I don't know what it is.
And I suspect that some of it is physical.
Some of it has to do with age and it has to do with health.
Well, you lose vitality and you lose your ability to be enthusiastic about things.
And that's one of the...
I mean, I'm committed to health and fitness just because that's something I enjoy and I like it.
But also because when you have energy, you can put more energy into things.
And as you get older, that energy wanes.
And particularly wanes if you abuse your body, if you eat shitty food and you drink too much and you don't sleep right and you don't exercise.
You don't have enough horsepower anymore to really squeeze out those magical moments, and I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of creative people, especially creative people that indulge in alcohol and drugs, they do their best work when they're younger because their body's more resilient, and there's more Or you hit a point where you get clean at a certain point.
Writing some of his best shit, being just a scumbag, trying to fuck everything that moves, getting his teeth kicked in in bar fights, and just going back and writing about it.
I think I'm an accumulation of all the people that I've ever met and all the experiences that I've ever had.
And it's one of the things about this podcast that has been insanely rewarding for me is that I can talk to so many different people.
And I can have these.
How many times do you even get a chance to talk to Sure.
Sure.
fun a lot of them been just fun but a lot of them have been like really interesting so it's been feeding my brain all this information for like and I have random shit in my head like I'll have a conversation with someone and I'll go, well, that's actually because of this.
And then they'll go, how the fuck do you even know that?
I had a conversation with this scientist and he explained it all to me and I just remembered that part.
It's almost like the ultimate parenting advice, right?
It's like sort of what you're telling your kid, which is find something you love, man.
Like whatever it is, and go all in on that.
I mean, it's that and find somebody who loves you, who you love.
Like those are the two things.
As a dad, like...
You know what I want?
Forget all that success.
Forget money.
Like, I want you to be, like, with somebody you love and who loves you, and I want you to do something you love and just leave it on the field, man, the best you got.
Yeah, and I guess in a lot of ways with children in particular, they learn by example.
They learn by good example and bad example.
Like a lot of people that I know that are clean and sober, the reason why they're clean and sober is because their parents were alcoholics or drug addicts and they don't want to have nothing to do with that shit.
They see the failures.
A lot of people whose parents just were excuse makers and always negative, they don't tolerate that shit at all.
They're super positive and they're disciplined and they get after it.
And the reason why they do that is because they saw that...
You know, and this is, these things that you learn from people that are doing what they want to do, there's like, there's traits that they share in common, and one of the big ones is focus and discipline.
I don't think you can get anywhere without it, and it's hard to do, because there's a lot of times, like that Pressfield talks about in The War of Art, that resistance is strong.
There's something about it, it's like you don't want to do the things that you know you should do.
And then when you have relaxation time, you enjoy it because you've earned it.
Man, when Saturday rolls around and I can put my feet up and watch fights and just eat fucking potato chips and just kick back, I enjoy the shit out of it because I actually earned it.
But man, if I haven't earned it, it feels terrible.
Watching TV when you're fucking off and you're supposed to be doing other things, you feel like a loser.
No, because I think, like, at a certain point, with a lot of this work, it's what you were talking about with improvising when the stand-up comics come in.
You do a lot of work, or what Hemingway used to say is he would write until he would get to, you know, knowing what the very next, the last sentence of the day was, he wouldn't write it.
So then he would wake up in the morning and he would know what the first sentence was.
When you think about upcoming projects, you've already got this nice body of work, all these really well done things that you can say, look, I've got these.
These are here.
When you look at a project, do you think of your past work and think that it has to measure up to that?
Do you just concentrate on what it is and just pour yourself into it?
Do you look at your past body?
Does it have any impact on what you're planning on doing?