All Episodes
Previous Next
March 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:33
1865 Atlas Shrugged: The Freedomain Radio Movie Interview

Stefan Molyneux interviews Harmon Kaslow, a producer of the new movie 'Atlas Shrugged' Part 1

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So, hi, everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
And I'm talking with one of the producers of Atlas Shrugged, the movie part one, Harman Caslow.
Thank you so much, Harman, for taking the time today.
Thanks, Stefan.
It's great to be talking with you, Tim.
Okay, I've got some first questions, of course.
And just for the record, I'm a huge fan of Ayn Rand.
I think that anybody who tries to deal with modern philosophy or ethics or politics or economics without taking her thinking into account is just a pretender.
But first of all, I wanted to just congratulate you and, of course, the entire team on what looks to be a truly spectacular and skilled production.
Thank you very much.
I mean, it's really a Result of a collaboration between, you know, a lot of people, you know, starting with our writers, you know, Brian O'Toole and John Manglioloro, our director, Paul.
We just had a fabulous cast.
And a lot of the people involved in the production, you know, from the director, photographer, production designer, our props person.
I mean, when you see the film, you can see how each one of them contributed to helping make this just a Yeah, I mean, I was very impressed with what you...
I have a slightly minor history in filmmaking myself, and I was really impressed with what you guys were able to achieve in terms of look and feel.
But what I thought was even more interesting and detailed was the emotional nuances of some of the scenes that I've seen, particularly the one where Hank Reardon comes home.
Where the interplay between the philosophical and the personal and the emotional and the relationships, they all seem to be very detailed, very fleshed out, very rich.
And that's something that's often underestimated in Ayn Rand's writing because she's so moving and gripping philosophically and the scope of her novels is so big.
But I thought you guys really captured very well the details in the relationships, which I think really drives the story.
First off, we had an amazing cast.
Most of these actors are not household names.
Some of them, certainly, you will recognize from their prior body of work.
But we were just very, very lucky to assemble an amazing cast, very talented.
Our primary goal, really, in casting, The people, the characters that you saw in that clip throughout the rest of the movie is just finding very, very talented people.
So we got off to a great start there.
Our director did a fabulous job in really putting those actors into the scene and having a vision for how we could create as much drama as we could.
As you well know, the book has a lot of dialogue in it.
And the key when you make a movie is to try to keep a pace and create something cinematic and entertaining.
And I think that the combination of the cast and direction got you what I think is pretty magical.
In the sense that you really get captivated by these scenes that are really lifted directly out of the book.
Right, and I also wanted to, not to sound overly fanboyish, but I think I was really impressed.
Given the amount of material that's in there, the tendency with such a large amount of material can be to rush things, but I thought that the pacing and the detail was just great.
If you had a chance to see the film?
I would absolutely die for a chance to see the film.
It's been my favorite book for...
The pacing of the overall film, actually, it comes in, I think the total running time is around 100 minutes.
So we really do try to keep people on the edge of their seat.
There is a lot of material.
We certainly did catch every scene out of the book, but we did try to create a nice, dramatic, Right,
right. Now, what's your history with the film?
How did you get involved in the production?
Well, I was brought into the film through a mutual friend of John Aguilar.
John is the person who acquired the rice vat 18 years ago.
And through a mutual friend, Howard and Karen Baldwin, John had made a decision In March, April of 2010, that he was not going to let the rights slip away.
And in order for him to not have that occur, he needed to get a film into production.
And so I was really brought in because of my background in working on lower budget films and just having a track record and being able to get relatively Movie timing is always the same,
right? It's just at the last minute that everything gets done.
Not in LA or anywhere.
I mean, today, or yesterday, Japan suffered a traumatic event with this horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunamis.
And I told John that, listen, you have no idea, especially if you're in California, if we could be disrupted it, and the last thing I'd want to have is some event occur That might prevent us from starting the film on the 15th.
So we gave ourselves 48 hours just in case some catastrophe occurred that prevented us from actually starting production.
on that day.
Right.
Now, I've been curious because, of course, the film has been talked about, it was talked about, I think, as early as the 70s as a miniseries, and then there was the Brangelina adoption juggernaut was also, I think, associated with the film at some point.
And now it seems like the timing couldn't be more fortuitous around the world events and the degree to which they almost seem to be lifted from the pages of the novel.
Do you think that the financial catastrophes, particularly in Europe over the past few years, have driven the urgency of the film, or do you think it was just a number of other factors coming together at the same time?
Well, I mean, for starters, many events from the story parallel real-life events today.
For instance, in the story the government passes business thwarting laws such as The anti-dogging dog rule and the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.
And in the life that we're experiencing today, the government's passing such laws as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
But really, you know, from a relevant standpoint, I mean on a more fundamental level, the story really matters today because You know, it traumatizes many of the timeless philosophic truths about human nature.
You have the role of reason in human life, the morality of rational self-interest versus greed.
You have the role of government as a citizen and our need of political and economic freedom.
And I think that these truths will always matter.
And so I think that the film Really, always will be relevant.
It could have been relevant. Did we get lucky?
I think we absolutely got lucky because a lot of the things that we're experiencing are things that really were almost verbatim identified in the book.
Right. I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, as I'm sure you guys have talked about quite a bit, you have a futuristic novel that now so much time has passed that it almost seems to be set in the recent past, which is a very kind of trippy thing to wrap your head around, but I think really works beautifully.
I mean, with the few exceptions that railroads aren't quite as important now as they used to be, but, you know, if I can believe that giant orcs can jump from giant elephants, I'm sure I can believe that railroads are important.
And, of course, it is just a metaphor for the emotional and motive power of philosophy.
I'm curious about how the casting went down.
Did you look for a particular kind of look?
Did you mostly go for a personality type?
Or how was it that you guys approached the casting?
Because I think everyone who's a fan of the novel has had that late-night conversation about who you'd put in what role.
And to actually have been part of it must have been a wonderful thing.
Yeah, I mean, first off, a lot of the pre-publicity or publicity regarding the making of a film based on Anna Shrug surrounded the fact that some very notable actors expressed.
I mean, everyone who has followed this is aware that there is a period of time that Angelina Jolie, for example, expressed an interesting thing.
And when the film was going through those incarnations, the film project through those incarnations, the ambition of John Aguilar was that this was going to be done by a studio.
And I think that a studio would take on this project if they had the added assurance of some marquee names.
When John decided that he was going to make the film independently, and I've been, you know, Quoted again, and the word that I used I think got a little misconstrued, but what I told John when I was brought on the project in April of 2010 was that in order for us to accomplish this task, we needed to eliminate all possible distractions.
And one of the distractions is trying to accommodate the needs and schedule of an A-list actor.
And that I thought that if we viewed the project where the book was the brand, that the book was ultimately More important than anything else.
That as long as we cast the movie with talented actors, we could get away with, for example, an actor not exactly looking like one of the characters out of the book.
Because their performance would be far more important to the people who are passionate and inspired by the book than somebody who looks the part but doesn't play it very well.
And so that was the approach that we took.
We got very lucky with an engaging casting director named Ronnie Yaskill.
He's done a lot of fabulous independent films, very reputable, brought an enormous amount of credibility to the project, which is what we needed.
Okay? With all the full stars, I don't think Hollywood took us seriously that we really were going to begin the film.
So, banking on Ronny Askell's credibility and the fact that she had been in the industry for a substantial period of time.
She was really able to bring in and read a lot of fabulous actors.
And I think that we were really lucky to be able to assemble a cast through just their real pure talent, not being driven by what movies they had done in the past and what their marquee value and all this, but whether or not they really just had talent.
Acting talent, really can comprehend and execute the role.
She did a great job.
Now, obviously you have to build the cast around the Dageny Taggart character, so it was a mad scramble because we didn't really decide on the Dageny Taggart character, I believe until Thursday, before the Sunday we were starting.
And once we got Taylor Schilling, who was courageous enough to take on the role.
To think about that decision in and of itself, once she was able to give us the green light that she was prepared to take on that role, then we had a whole slew of very talented actors that we had already read, and the whole cast came together quite rapidly, and I think that people are really, really pleased with the choices that we ultimately made.
Yeah, I think as I was sort of following the production as it was going along, there were two things that I thought were great.
One, of course, was that you weren't using name stars.
I mean, you know that you're going to get a certain quality of performance and a certain recognizability and a certain marketability, but it would be impossible if Angelina Jolie were playing Dagny Taggart to not look at that and say, hey, that's Angelina Jolie playing Dagny Taggart.
It wouldn't be the person. That's the problem you get with the stars, is you get the exposure, but you don't get the character just in and of themselves.
You can't watch Jack Nicholson without knowing you're watching Jack Nicholson.
So I think going with the people who weren't as recognizable really lets people connect more Yeah,
no, no, I can't. You know, kudos need to go out to, you know, again, really the writers, because it is a creative process.
And what you're basically telling the people writing the screenplay is, I don't need you to reimagine this.
What I really need you to do is to make this cinematic.
And to the extent that we can use Aime's words in the movie, let's try and do that.
The first temptation You know, that a writer would have.
To give it, you know, their own fingerprints, so to speak, and to make changes.
And, you know, we avoided that.
And I think that that has ended up paying us enormous dividends because people who have been inspired by the book, and where the book has, you know, changed their lives, and they try to come and see this movie after waiting many, many years, and they hear those very words come to life.
We really appreciate the effort that we've done.
And so it's all about having that mindset.
And if you went to a studio, I think a studio would be sort of hard-pressed to say, you know what, let's just use the same words that Ayn Rand used when she wrote the book.
I think that they would You know, allows creative freedom.
And I can tell you, if you have a follow-up conversation with John Aguilaro, he will tell you some of the incredible journeys that writers took with adapting The book came into a movie and creating things.
There's versions of screenplays, for example, where Ayn Rand herself is in the movie.
For us, which is incredibly hard to comprehend, but anyway, you've got to see that your description really does fit because John did have the freedom,
in a sense, to do it his way and not be Persuaded by a system that would have been tempted to make changes that could have been fatal to keeping our core audience interested and supportive of the film.
Yeah, and I think because the film is so loved, and of course, a lot of your initial audience are going to be the many fans of the books who, you know, like Trekkies and like Lord of the Rings people, but hopefully with a bit more philosophical integrity, they know the story and they know the dialogue and they know the characters so well that if you deviated it, then they would feel that.
And all they'd feel is the deviation from the novel.
And they wouldn't be able to follow the story in and of itself as an original story.
But at the same time, they wouldn't be able to follow it in the way that they understood the book.
So I think that would be quite jarring for people.
So, you know, again, I think that's the right thing to do.
But I can't imagine that a major studio wouldn't want to dilute certain things to appeal to a wider audience or dumb it down a little bit to appeal to more of a wider audience, which is exactly what Ayn Rand fought.
And, of course, she didn't allow any edits of the book.
But I did want to mention, just because she does actually show up in the book, there's a little bit in Galt's Gulch where a woman who's a writer looks longingly after John Galt.
Just in the last part of the book, I'll send you a reference if you're curious.
She does actually show up in her own novel.
She did a little bit of a Hitchcock walk-in just at the end.
But that's just a little bit of detail for an Ayn Rand geek like me.
But so how's the response been?
How's the rollout going?
Are you popping champagne?
Are you still with bated breath?
How's it going? Well, I mean, this is a scramble.
It's a struggle. We need our audience to be awakened to the fact that, from a theatrical point of view, motion pictures should be viewed as perishable.
In other words, we need people to become activated on a local level and to go support the movie in the theater in order for the exhibitors to keep the movie showing beyond just our initial week.
Having said that, we're bringing on anywhere from 3 to 5 new theaters in our 11 selected markets almost on a daily basis, so we're growing quite well.
In addition, we are getting a lot of traffic on our website.
Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the number one dot com, is getting an enormous amount of traffic.
You can see our trailer there, or you can see it on our YouTube channel, and we're getting close to a million views.
And that's just for the audience to know.
That's Atlas Shrugged Part 1 dot com.
We'll go to the numberone.com.
And we also have other goodies.
I mean, we posted up some music from the movie.
We called it the John Galt theme, but it's just really a compilation of a lot of the various themes in the movie to give people an idea of the sort of production value that they're going to experience.
There's also, again, you refer to it, there's a clip directly out of the movie.
And we're starting...
You know, really to get a lot of awareness and attention from some of the major media outlets such as the LA Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Hannity, John Stossel, Glenn Beck.
And so, you know, I really feel like we're getting, you know, this fraction.
I just need people to understand that the exhibitors have a very low level of patience for a movie.
And so people need to really become committed, if they're interested in seeing the movie, to see it on that opening weekend.
That's really, really vital to us.
And if we can get pretty decent numbers to show up on the opening weekend, we can really begin to platform the movie out.
And I think people like you and myself really think that positive change For this country can be forthcoming if people will get out, see the movie, understand the philosophies that are espoused in the book, and see the merit of this.
I mean, there is change and a revolution going on in this country.
And this movie is one way of exposing it to an enormous audience.
But we need support on the ground from a lot of people to make that happen.
Right. So I'm going to strongly recommend listeners to this, too.
I mean, obviously, if you're a fan, you're going to go and see it.
But, of course, it's the ultimate date movie.
There's nothing more romantic than pounding steam trains and tunnels.
So that's very, very important for people.
Take dates. Take people. Take your grandmother.
Take people who have had no exposure to it, because it will be a way of opening up your interest to other people and getting other people to understand that What I was going to say is,
we're dealing with a very tough crowd when you start dealing with objectivists, who are people who have ascribed to and follow our philosophies.
But it's important for people to understand two things.
One is, when you try to adapt a book, we're not trying to emulate what you imagine that should be.
We'll never really be able to capture someone's imagination as well as that person does.
And everyone's going to have a different imagination of what the book should be.
So I think when people see the movie, they should go in there with an expectation of really how good of a job did we do and how faithful are we to the book?
Is the book informative to them about her philosophies?
And I think if people approach it with the right attitude, we're going to be able to cross over beyond just our core audience.
And people will see that this is an incredibly inspiring story, for example, for women.
I mean, if you look at Dagny Taggart, a very objective point of view, not in the context of Alice Shrug, but just in the context of the story they're going to see.
I mean, what you see is a very attractive, smart, tenacious woman with a lot of things working against her, and she's getting them done!
And she's really accomplishing A lot with the government and the people that she worked for in a world that's not really supportive of her.
And she's getting big studded.
It's very, very inspiring.
She, I think, comes across as an incredible role model.
And that's what I think, you know, your listeners and the fans Need to see this ad.
This is an opportunity, if we treat the movie properly, if we put it in the right context, to really broaden the audience and expose it to a much, much greater amount of the population than even the book has today.
Yeah, certainly. My hope is that people see the movie, are excited by the quality of the movie, which again, I can't say enough good things about from what I've seen.
And of course, the invitation goes out to continue to read the book and to explore the thoughts of this amazing woman.
Just before we finish up here, based on my, again, limited experience on movie sets, there's usually at least a half dozen good stories that come out of the production time.
Do you have any sort of that roll off the tip of your tongue that were particularly exciting during the production?
Well, I mean, the whole adventure of making a movie, as you likely pointed out, I mean, it includes a lot of, let's say, drama, so to speak.
And certainly we encountered it You know, almost on a daily basis.
You know, for example, as we were nearing the end of production, I believe we only had three days of photography left, and one of our critical locations vaporized on us.
Didn't work, wasn't available.
And so, you know, our crafty production team, they worked around the clock, they found a location out here in Santa Monica, Wow, I think that people have no appreciation for the fact that 12 hours earlier, it didn't exist.
And what I'm referring to is the location where we shot the Reardon Steel scenes.
Wow, that is a lot of dressings.
One example, we have some great stories.
We sent a very tenacious crew out on the road to shoot that provided some footage for us And they have stories where they're following trains with cameras.
And in today's world, the TSA, the Security Administration, seeing anything pointed at a public mode of transportation certainly raises a lot of eyebrows.
And here these guys are, you know, in a utility van, the door slid open, pointing something at a train, driving down the road, and next thing you know, this guy's, you know, radioing ahead, you know, I think I'm getting stalked by something that doesn't look good.
So, you know, all of that stuff, you know, happened behind the scenes, but what people will see is a very polished, finished product that we're really, really proud of, and that we hope, you know, They come and see it in the theaters on the 15th.
We have some nice production stills at our website, atlashrugpart1.com.
And shortly we'll be listing the various theaters where the film is playing and people can pre-buy tickets.
And we'll show the exhibitors that there's a true interest and demand for the movie.
Yeah, I think that it does need to be a collective effort.
People really need to step up to make sure that they get, as I hate to put it so crudely, but there are the economics that we're all aware of.
get the asses in the seats, get the demand going, and raise the profile of this film to the point where it breaks out of the subculture of the people who know it already, which is a pretty significant subculture.
But I think that the film is going to have by far the most impact, both artistically, philosophically, and socially, if it gets as wide an audience.
And I think those of us who are fans of the book really need to just step up, grit our teeth, and annoy the hell out of people to get them to come and see this film, because I really do think that it's worth it, and it is the only way that it's going to have the kind of impact that the story and the movie deserves.
I could agree with you more stuff, and I really appreciate you giving me a chance to talk to your audience.
Oh, my pleasure, and I really look forward to seeing the film, and maybe I'll give you a line again after I've seen it.
Okay, very good. Thanks, Herman.
▲
Export Selection