Chris Vogler is the author of “The Writer’s Journey”, a wildly popular (and flat out must-read) guidebook to mythic structure for storytellers. Beyond being a successful author, Chris is also a Hollywood story consultant who has worked with multiple studios, including a long stint with Disney, where he heavily influenced the projects The Lion King, Hercules, and Aladdin to name a small few. Throughout his career Chris has reviewed and provided coverage for over 20,000 scripts (you read that correctly).
In our conversation, Chris effortlessly breaks down the stages of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey into simple, accessible principles that you can use to write your own story (both literally and figuratively). Beyond Chris’ detailed explanation of how you can write more captivating stories – and select the perfect characters your audience will adore – we dive deep into how you can use the principles of the Hero’s Journey to both understand and change the story of your own life.
Whether you’re interested in learning how to apply the Hero’s Journey to your own work, or if you’re looking for ways to better understand (and rewrite) your own personal story, this conversation is for you. I absolutely loved this interview and have no doubt you will find Chris’ breakdown of the Hero’s Journey as mesmerizing and entertaining as I did.
Chris Vogler has had a long career as a Hollywood story consultant and executive, but is probably best known as the author of “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers”, a popular guide to the Hero’s Journey concept that has deeply influenced storytelling in Hollywood and publishing. Now in print for over 25 years, the book is a standard text in screenwriting programs and has been translated into fifteen languages. His model of the Hero’s Journey, inspired by the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, was developed during his years as a story analyst at Disney, Fox and Paramount, where he reviewed thousands of screenplays, novels and comic books and built up an encyclopedic knowledge of story in all its forms. His myth-inspired ideas found their way into Disney’s THE LION KING, HERCULES, ALADDIN and other animated features. His book, The Writer’s Journey, began as a seven-page memo that he circulated among Disney executives and that soon became part of Hollywood’s collective story knowledge. He now travels the world speaking about the Hero’s Journey and conducting workshops for writers and people from many walks of life who are finding his ideas useful.
Chris Vogler: If you can step back a little bit from that edge from that threshold that you're at, to see, well, how big a journey is this that will help you determine roughly what stage you're in? Am I at the beginning and I have like 24 more obstacles ahead, or am I nearly done and I just have that very hard, but simple in a way, last choice
Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Chris Vogler who is a Hollywood story consultant, and he is the author of the Writer's Journey, which is a guidebook to mythic structure for storytellers. And your shortlist of experience and accomplishments includes reviewing and providing coverage for over 20,000 scripts, which I can't even fathom. And you've consulted for multiple studios over the years, including a long stint with Disney, where you heavily influenced projects such as the Lion, King, Hercules, and Aladdin to name a small few. Chris, it is beyond a pleasure to be able to share the microphone with you today and allow you to share your expertise with my audience, I can't thank you enough for being here.
Chris Vogler: Well, it's a great thrill for me from our little conversation. So far, I know we have a lot of ideas in common about editing and other things and about how all of these things it can be abstract and theoretical actually have very solid practical applications in our lives. And, you know, our it's a wonderful set of tools, and I'm very happy to be able to talk about it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I'm excited, we can finally bring this together. Because I see this as a foundational educational resource for either anybody that just wants to learn how do I become a better screenwriter? Or how do I become a better editor or even a better composer any, any craft that involves storytelling, I think understanding the hero's journey and the components is vitally important. But as we also discussed a little bit before, offline, I think it's just as important to understand the hero's journey, not to tell and create fictional stories for a living, but to have the power to structure and rewrite your own story. So we're first going to talk about nuts and bolts understanding story structure, but then we're going to get really existential and ask, Well, how do I do this for myself in my own life, but where I want to start is, and you can probably speak to this a lot more than I could. But it seems to me that nowadays, a lot of people that are coming into the industry, they kind of take for granted how simple it is to get an answer to the following question. Can anybody tell me what the blueprint is to write a story? Sure. Go online and buy the writers journey done. Here's your blueprint, right. But I don't think they really appreciate how just a few decades ago, there was no blueprint. And people didn't really understand how stories worked, even though for millennia, and most of if not all recorded human history, we've kind of had a basic story structure, and we didn't know it. And then all of a sudden, you come along with this random memo that ends up in a Xerox machine that becomes the periodic table of storytelling. So talk to me about your practical guide, what it is and how in the world. It ended up on the desk of none other than Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Chris Vogler: Yes. Well, you know, you're absolutely right. In my lifetime, there has been a raising of consciousness, it's the way I would put it, about these, what you might call the unwritten rules of storytelling. These were, you know, there's a set of principles about how you communicate with an audience, how you connect up with them, and allow them invite them in to feel that the story is informing their life somehow. And this is, you know, a body of knowledge that's developed over time. But it was very much in the background of consciousness. And it was something that might have been passed around in pieces among playwrights and actors and people who were crafting various forms of entertainment and writing novels and so forth. But it was never codified, never sort of abstracted and put into a set of principles, and so forth. And that happened in my time. You know, what, when I went to film school, which was in the mid 70s It's amazing to think this, but there weren't any screenwriting books to speak of. It was in that time or maybe towards the 80s that you first got Robert McKee lecturing and writing about his ideas on story structure, and a great man named Syd field He wrote an excellent book, abstracting his knowledge of screenplays into a simple paradigm, the three act structure. And, you know, the these were boons and great benefits to all of us who work because it articulated these things and brought them out into consciousness. And my little part in it was, before any of this happened, I was on the trail looking for the unwritten rules of storytelling. I grew up in the Midwest, on a farm, and was very distant from Hollywood, but it felt a real direct surge of some kind of weird energy watching movies. And just I wanted to turn the screen open and jump in there, you know, and be part of it somehow, I think you had a similar experience, desire rising in you. So I was looking because I felt there must be a code, there must be some what we would call today an algorithm for how you do this magic process of connecting with the audience, invite them and make them feel that in some way, the story is really about them. Maybe it's a metaphor for what's going on in their own lives. And they look quite closely at just about any story that comes by for clues about how can I improve my own performance in my own life, by comparing it with that other people in the story. So I was on the lookout for something like this, and I couldn't find it. And even, you know, going to film school, there was very, very little, just the most boilerplate, hardcore stuff. But there's a beginning a middle and an end, and you need to have some exposition, and you need to have transitions, you know, real basic stuff. But the lightning bolt for me was encountering the work of this man, Joseph Campbell, who had written in a academic way, kind of, he was a popular writer, and he wrote for a general audience, but he came from a sort of academic background. And he identified this thing, the hero's journey, which was a pattern of some number of steps that he found in most of the myths and fairy tales and legends of the world. And I found this while I was in film school. And coincidentally, it happened to be around the time that the first Star Wars movie came out. So I read Campbell's book, and the lightning bolt struck me that this is it, this is the thing I was looking for. This is the code. And although he wasn't thinking about movies, Campbell had identified this inner structure. So then I went to see the first Star Wars movie, and just sat there with my jaw dropping farther and farther down to my chest, because it was following Campbell's outline given in the book step by step by step. And I later learned that George Lucas had been influenced by Campbell's work he had encountered it in school and said, This is as he had the same reaction I did this is something useful, that we can plug into commercial movies, it doesn't have to be abstract or theoretical or anything. It's it communicates directly. And so I knew I was onto something. And then I went through a long period of trying to apply it. I got jobs in the in the movie business as a story analyst a reader of scripts and had to write reports and that's how I started racking up my 20,000 was by doing eight or 10 scripts a week and writing reports on them and all the time, had this hero's journey model at hand to compare with the scripts that were going by the end, I would see oh, there's step three and step four, and Step nine, Step seven, it may be jumbled in different order, but still present in every script that came by so I had a body of material to to feast on and showed me all the possibilities and all the different variations and to get an off of being a formula into more a set of tools or like you said the periodic table or the color chart or something, or the notes of the scale that allow us to combine them in many different ways to get results but with some kind of inner sense of connectedness and structure. So I ended up at Disney after We've had several studios working for a few years. And they were in a renaissance then trying to rebuild their animation department. And I decided to take this Campbell idea and condense it into this very, very tight form. That was in vogue at the studios then, which was memoranda, memos that went around within the executive halls, to dictate and Jeffrey Katzenberg was very good at this. He was an excellent memo writer, and he laid out sort of a philosophy of the company and a way of doing business and guidelines. And this was all wonderful because most of the time, movie making is very chaotic and disorganized and not centrally controlled, or, in modern times, anyway, things are very haphazard, but he imposed a little bit of order. And it really sort of unified the film's of that time. And so I said, I'm going to write a Jeffrey Katzenberg style memo, and put in in about seven pages, all these points that I had gleaned from Campbell. And as as you might know, there's kind of a legend or myth that I've created about this. But it was true that I left a copy of the of the memo that I had written on the Xerox machine and somebody found it, you know, I left it on the copying plate. And somebody found it and plagiarized it and sent it up the chain of command to Katzenberg. And I heard about it through the grapevine. And decided, well, I better step up and claim this, which was way out of my character comfort zone, to stick my neck out like that and go, you know, past the chain of command to go right to the top. And I wrote a letter to Katzenberg and claimed it I said, I hear you've been aware of this and that you thought it was a good idea. And I'm, I'm the real author of this. And to my amazement, he called me immediately, as soon as he got the letter, you open it, read it, he picked up the phone, and he said, I have a job for you, you need to go over talk to the animation people because we're restarting and we have new energy there, they were doing beauty in the beast, and starting Lion King. And I just walked in the door at the right time. And they had already received my memo, the memo passed around and became like a viral sensation, not only at Disney, but all over Hollywood. Because it was in this very condensed form and could be easily transmitted. So I found a ready audience in animation, and ended up working quite closely with them on Lion King, and plugged into it quite a number of scenes and bits and concepts that came directly out of Campbell's work. And it just was a good fit for that particular picture. So that's how the whole thing got rolling. And then eventually, I developed it through a teaching at UCLA Extension writers program. I tested the ideas on my students and eventually turned it into my book, The Writer's Journey. So that's the condensed version of of my exciting journey to this point.
Zack Arnold: I love it. There are probably if I want it to I get turned this into just what you share it into a four part 90 minute series for each part breaking down all of these because there are so many amazing takeaways. The first one is that clearly you understand story structure because what you did and I just I'm just kind of breaking this down for people. I knew where I wanted to end up with a story was the memo on the desk and how it led you to where your career path is. But you didn't answer my question. You structured the answer to my question by sharing your hero's journey, right here was me in the ordinary world stepping into the world of adventure, right in the memo and everything, all these various stages, you construct it using the hero's journey, which we're going to get into where I want to go back to though, which I think is important. You kind of alluded to this. You don't even know this yet, but you and I have a lot more in common than you think I also grew up on a farm in the Midwest. Uh huh. So to me growing up, and I know that you were from Missouri correctly, right? I was from Wisconsin, so give or take same general area, but I would assume that we can share a lot of stories about our past that minus the zip code are probably almost identical. But I think the thing for me is that and this happens for a lot of people everywhere, but specifically feeling so disconnected from an industry of Hollywood. You watch a movie or a TV show and it looks like magic. How do they do this? It's a magic trick. Yeah. But the people that do really, really well have realized and discovered this isn't magic, it's math. There's a formula, like you said, there's an algorithm to it. And you helped bring structure and simplicity to that algorithm. I've gone through the hero with 1000 faces, I watched the the piece, I believe it was Bill Moyer had done an extensive multi part series on PBS in the 80s went through that whole thing. It's not easy to get through, it's challenging to go through either the hero with 1000 faces or watch that series and be like, Oh, I get it. Now I understand story structure. So Joseph took something that was really complex, and like you said, almost entirely in our subconscious, and made a conscious, but you said, Let me break this down into seven pages, the story structure of how we've told all stories through all of recorded human history, put it in a seven page memo, and all of a sudden, you become the Jerry Maguire of Hollywood, the metal is getting passed everywhere, and it changes everything. But for me, the biggest takeaway here is that to be a great storyteller, yeah, there has to be some inspiration and some magic, but there's a lot of math involved. And knowing that structure is you said, having read 20,000 Plus scripts, I would guess that largely the difference between the ones that were really working, and really not working, were the ones that weren't adhering to the basic formulas.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, that's certainly true. And that was what when I got to test over and over again, by critically examining the structure, really, of these many, many things, and they came in all forms, it wasn't just scripts, it was magazine articles, and comic books. And sometimes just somebody would come in and tell us a story about their life, and pitch it in the room. And so there was nothing even written down. But still, these things we're all united by, by having this thing we call a story. It's, it's interesting, you use the term math, I flinch a little bit at that. Because I'm not a naturally math minded person, that was my weakness. But I could see that there was some kind of inner logic, and that some of it does follow. I would say, maybe it's a little broader than math, it follows principles. Some of them are scientific, like many of the aspects of storytelling and developing characters and so forth, have to do with magnetism and electricity, that there is actual magnetism between characters. There are attractive forces and repelling forces, there is something like electric current that runs through a well constructed story when you make two points in a story of opposition, that makes a current between them. And you can send signals along that piece of wire almost that you can imagine to exist. So there was something multi dimensional going on, about storytelling. And I position myself as the guy who this is partly because of being a script reader, you're exposed to everything, you know, you go to a party, and somebody says, Oh, yeah, I'm a nuclear physicist, and you go, I just read a script about that. Whatever it is, you just read a script about it. So you know a lot about a lot of things, just by the nature of that job. And so it allowed me to be a generalist, and to see, you know, patterns from many other areas. If you know something about dance, you know something about storytelling. If you know something about playing a guitar, you know something about storytelling, if you know something about being a nurse, you know something about storytelling, and so on. So all these disciplines, including US did in the military, helped me to come at it from a lot of different directions and make a more three dimensional picture.
Zack Arnold: I love that you push back on this idea a little bit about math, because I think you're correct in saying that. I don't want to oversimplify and I don't think that quality storytelling, and moviemaking and TV making is magic. But you're right. It's not just math. But you and I again, this is an area where we have so much in common I love the idea of breaking things down into principles, not necessarily rules, or must follow this exact formula. But there are principles that must be followed. And if we break down the hero's journey, which I want to do on a second, it's a series of principles and I think that some people do fall prey to its math I'm sure you've heard this many times where it's like, well, the ordinary world must end by page 14 and a half and they must have the called the adventurer by 16. And the meeting with a mentor must happen here and you're like, it doesn't have to but those are certain principles that are largely adhere to because they work and they've stood the test of time. Right? So I think it's a matter of it's, it's the whatever the sweet spot is between 100% magic and 100%. Math, it's somewhere in there being a great storyteller, right?
Chris Vogler: Yeah, yeah, I definitely would agree with that, that you have to, you have to be light on your feet. And that means that you can shift your weight, depending on the needs of the story at hand of the scene you're working on. And sometimes you will be reaching into the bag of tricks of math that I have one plus one, what does that equal? And, you know, I have a need, and I have a wish, and I have a desire. And we've put those things together. What does that equal, there are mathematical type of formulas and equations embedded in this art of storytelling. But it, it can lead you down some wrong paths. And you're right, that that was one of the things that happened. As soon as Syd field came online. There was an immediate position positioning of many executives and people who, you know, decided how much money was going to be spent, and that sort of thing, marketing people and so on. To say, it says in the book, this has to happen by this page. And it happened two pages later. So you gotta take out two pages, they were very literal minded about it. And you have to be lighter on your feet than that.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. Well, I would guess that for most creatives, most writers, most editors, whatever your position might be as a storyteller, very rarely has anybody ever given you the feedback? Well, it feels very formulaic. And that felt like a compliment. Right? Maybe sometimes, but in generally somebody's like, well, it's formulaic. You're like, oh, well, I wanted to do something original and different. So again, it's not all about math and formula. It's about these principles, right? These these guiding posts along the journey. And for anybody that is listening, first of all, this right here is the rulebook. This is literally the Bible on structure, the writers journey, if they want to read hundreds of pages and dig into it, that's what this is for, we're going to have a link in the show notes. But if I were to very literally answer the question, what are the stages of the hero's journey, I'm gonna go through them very, very quickly, because they're all in the book, what I want you to help me do both for me and for my audience, is to boil it down into an even simpler sentence or two. So we can not only apply to our storytelling, but our own lives, but very, very quickly. If somebody said, Zack, what are the stages of the hero's journey? I'd say, well, in Act One, first, you have the ordinary world, then comes the call to adventure, the refusal of the call the meeting with the mentor, and the crossing of the first threshold, then we interact to, and we have our tests, our allies, our enemies, there's the approach to the inmost, cave viewer deal in the reward, and then act three is the road back the resurrection and the return with the elixir, and they would look at me and they'd be like, I'm sorry, what now? Right? So if somebody were to ask you, and you were to explain it in plain language, what's the hero's journey? What are the steps? What does it look like?
Chris Vogler: Well, you know, starting with that, ordinary world, this kind of gives you a baseline for the story. And if you put it into common phrase, it would be where is he coming from? You know, we look at any story with the understanding that it picks up point in time to start but there was time before that, and somebody is introduced to us at a moment in their lives. But there was a trail that got them there. And that can be suggested or expressed, or it can be unveiled in the course of the story. But it's there. And you need to acknowledge that, that this is the this is the world, the universe that the hero exists in, and usually is a little uncomfortable there. That's the kind of key to that ordinary world is that it may seem nice and perfect, but that usually conceals some disturbance under the water, you know, the surface might be combat under the water, something's going on. So that's something is the second stage the call to adventure. And this is something that seems to be baked into almost every story. It's a necessity for the teller of the story, to announce to the audience as something is missing or something needs to be done. And somebody's got to do it. So that comes many times. In stories there will be a literal trumpet All in the soundtrack, they will go to the brass instruments and play some kind of rock horn call. And it coincides with somebody saying, you know, there's a problem down the street, and I'm not dealing with it. But you're the sheriff, so you have to go deal with it. So the hero is called in. And typically, they are a little reluctant or fearful about that. And that's under this third stage of the refusal of the call. Some heroes are not reluctant, but somebody is in the composition, somebody is fearful. And I think this is really important for the audience, so that they know, this is not a walk in the park, this is not an easy picnic. This will be challenging. So the hero often will express some fear or somebody in the scene expresses some concern. The next thing is to overcome that many stories bring in a mentor or the hero will touch base with some source of wisdom. And it might be internal their own wiring diagram, their own sense of what's right, that moral compass something like that, their experience, or it's some external figure, who often comes in the shape and myths of a wise old man or a wise old woman, they're a fairy godmother, or something like that, who gives the hero some advice, or some magic weapon or magic tool or a magic carpet or something of that nature. And this sort of symbolizes the need that we have when we go on an adventure, to get some reassurance from maps from people who've been there before, from our own memories of of similar events. So next thing up is once you're reassured by connecting with this source, either internal or external, is crossing the threshold. And this is where the story really gets going. And everybody sort of feels this in the audience, they know that a certain amount of time is needed to prepare and tell me the things about the character and what the problem is. And then there's a sort of shift in almost a breathing rhythm of the story. And now it really gets rolling, the hero decides something to get involved, or it's decided for him or her by circumstances, and off they go. Next thing is they get into this new world, because most stories take place in two worlds a world the hero knows the ordinary world, and the special world. And that's what we really get excited about in travel is going someplace special and new. And so when you go there, you will meet tests, allies and enemies, you'll be tested in some small ways, you'll find out things are very different there. And you'll find some people or forces are helpful to you, they become your allies, and some are not and they might become your enemies are your your foe in that special world. So next stage is one approach. This is stage seven in the scheme. And this is a period of time where we are marching, we are moving into the deeper into the special world and getting deeper in relationships. So it's all about going a little deeper, and the almost breathing pattern of the audience may change, they may be excited at first in the first opening movements, and breathing and kind of shallow way. And then they might breathe a little deeper as we go. And sort of relax, like we're gonna be here for a while. So there's literal changes in the audience's physiology even. But they get to know each other better the characters and the audience gets to know the characters better, and go past first appearances. So next thing is now we've marched deep into this special world, we're going to confront something big and dangerous and scary, that may threaten our lives. And this is another kind of essential thing, that stories need to be magnified and intensified by a confrontation with death or failure. The failure is a form of death. It's the death of your hopes. It's the death of your ambitions. So we all fear that and this is about facing your fears, whatever they are, they were evoked early in the story. But now they are right in front of you, and you have to confront those. And you may die as heroes often do. In mythology, they literally die and go into the underworld and are reborn, or they go close to death. Maybe they have to deal death to someone else. Maybe someone near them dies, maybe part of them dies, maybe part of their hopes die, something dies. And that has a transformative effect, which leads to the next step, stage nine, which is the reward. So that's a kind of promise in the story that if you face your fears, there will be a reward for that, you will gain something better sense of confidence about yourself better relationship with the other members of the team, maybe more information, maybe you've gained a treasure. So it's a sort of celebration of having faced your fear and survived. So next thing up is the road back, which is now going into the third act. It's sort of attorney post for going into the third act, where heroes realize, I've done my business in this special world, I face my fear, I got the treasure. Now I have to take it home, so to speak, maybe literally back home, or to the next stage of my development. And so I've got another challenge now, which is to finish this thing, and follow through on what I've learned and apply it in the real world. So the heroes often have an intensification of energy at this point, which comes out in the form of chase scenes, there are a lot of chase scenes in movies everywhere, you can start with a chase scene, you can have a whole movie, that's a chase, but they seem to concentrate about three quarters of the way through, at the end of the second act of the beginning of the third act, there is an acceleration of energy. And often that takes the form of a chase where someone's escaping or you're chasing after someone has stolen something from you, or they're chasing after you because you're trying to escape, something like that it's very, very strong pattern that repeats in the 20,000 scripts I looked at, I would say it's in 19,000 of them that there's some kind of chase at that point. So the last two, the stage 11 is the resurrection where the hero goes through another facing off with death and failure, the possibility of death and failure is raised again. But in a more magnified way. This is where everything's on the line. And it's the climax of the story. And it has an effect on the hero and the audience of sort of purifying them and burning away all of their false ideas. So the hero finally, is purified by the experience and is able to face the fears and it should be very tense and suspenseful. And we should be worried that the hero is not going to make it or will lose. But in the end usually most stories unless it's a tragedy, most stories, the hero will work it out. And then enjoy the triumph which is called returned with the elixir, which is some kind of magic potion that heals all wounds or solves all problems. And Campbell said this was absolutely essential in a well developed Hero's Journey story. The hero has to come back with something to share either a good story to tell an example of their behavior that look I've faced death and it was terrible, a terrible opponent, but I survived and it can be survived, you can overcome the most difficult things. So they become an example to others. So that's one form of the lecture. It might be love. It might be truth, it might be justice. There are a variety of ways that things can unfold as that last card is played. But it kind of gives you the moral of the story and gives you some sense of how life can go on with what you've learned and suggested in your life. You might face a lot of difficulties and maybe repeatedly go back to the edge of death or failure. But in the end, you're going to come away with something that's healing and useful to you. So that's the hero's journey. I see it as a set of warnings and promises. I guess I hadn't put it that way before but that seems to be what what emerges as I talk about it here is that it's you know, half the time it's telling you Look, I'd be scared, ooh, this is really scary stuff. And then half the time to say it's fine, you've got what it takes, you can do it. So it's a it's a mix of those messages.
Zack Arnold: Well, I appreciate that beat by beat breakdown. And what I find so interesting about it is that if somebody had just randomly clicked a button to turn the dial on the radio, first, we're in a podcast, and they were back in the day, and they knew nothing about you and your background. And the fact that we were talking about quote, unquote, Hollywood, screenwriting, they would just think we were talking about life, they would think, Oh, somebody's talking about the stages of our lives right now, which is why I find the hero's journey so fascinating. And I want to get to that in a second. What I'd like to do as far as this understanding the structure, we've now broken down all the beats, but if we wanted to turn it into an elevator pitch, and it was a matter of like, if somebody said How to story structure work, well, there's three acts, there's, you know, the opening, there's the middle, and there's the end, if we were going to take the hero's journey, and really simplify to an elevator pitch, and it's, let's say, three to five bullet points. Well, you have a character in an ordinary world, their call to adventure this, that. And the other thing, what's the elevator pitch version to really understand this in just a couple of sentences and get the major beats, maybe not all 12 steps, but kind of the core beats?
Chris Vogler: Well, I guess it would be something along the lines of an ordinary guy just like you and me, or an ordinary person, just like you and me, goes about their daily business. And then suddenly, as if from out of nowhere, something happens that causes them to realize they have to face something really, really difficult. And they go into it not knowing any idea about what it's going to be or what they're going to face. But they they take a deep breath, and they jump in anyway, they meet a lot of obstacles along the way. But they in the end are able to overcome because they reached deep down inside themselves, they find some inner source of strength. And through that they're able to overcome even the most difficult things. And I think the most important word in that elevator pitch is but this is something I learned in pitching and also in observing structure, in many, many examples was that there's a kind of rhetoric about pitching. Where you tell people stuff they already know, to kind of get them lulled into a sense it Yeah, yeah, I got it. I understand this. And then you go, but and and you say, every, for instance, somebody pitched a story one time, as everybody knows about Abraham Lincoln, greatest president ever freed the slaves, supposedly, you know, was assassinated, helped keep the country together through the Civil War. But what you didn't know is Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter. So that's how they pitched Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and made a string of movies out of that. So so the the sort of turning point in it is an important thing. It sort of hooks the audience that lulls them into thinking, we know about this, we understand this. And then there's that. But and I think that runs through scenes, and it runs through the whole structure of a long running series, episode by episode and season by season. You think you got it figured out, but there's, you know, another twist. So this is part of how I think about stories.
Zack Arnold: Sure. And there's one additional word that if I were to take your elevator pitch and refine it, which makes me very self conscious of the fact that, you know, the guy that refines all the best stories, and has been teaching the framework, all of a sudden, I'm gonna give him notes. There's one word that I think is super important. And that's the word transformation. Right? We love watching stories and the hero's journey, because we want to see transformation, a question that I asked my students all the time when they're on their hero's journey, usually they're coming to me around the point of either I've realized the ordinary world, meaning my current job, or current circumstances are not one that I want anymore. And they're giving themselves the call to adventure. But all of a sudden, like, I can't do this, it's too scary. I don't know how to do it, whatever. And I say, Well, what kind of stories do you want to tell? Well, I'm really interested in human interest stories where, you know, the character goes on a journey, and there's some real transformation. And I'm like, oh, so basically every story that's ever been told in the history of mankind, right, but it really is all about we want to watch some form of transformation.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, I totally would agree with that. I sort of noticed that, as I was telling it, that that is an important and necessary element. There's, there's one exception to that, which I kind of tentatively leave room for this, which is, there might be a kind of story we can imagine. Where the whole point of the story Is that the hero doesn't transform that they stay exactly the same all the way through. And that can work. When you're dealing with something like let's say, the Lone Ranger, where the guy is, qualities are known, and they stay the same, he might transform within the episode by taking on a disguise in which the Lone Ranger and other characters like that often do. But he's the Lone Ranger, starting middle and ending. And another version of that would be where a character doesn't transform to a tragic effect, where they should have transformed, they had every opportunity to transform to change their behavior or learn something or try a different path. And they didn't. And usually, that ends up as a sad case, where where you've missed your opportunity to transform. So I wouldn't leave room within that, for for sure, but But generally speaking, I think you're right from the audience's point of view is that they might enjoy the vacation from that once in a while. But most of the time, this is what they really eat up is the fact that people do change. I mean, it's kind of a promise or a hope, that we can transform that we can change, that others around us can change and learn and grow. So stories sort of play into that desire that we have. But it certainly is fascinating to watch. And I think this goes back to the earliest forms of storytelling, which were dance and, you know, ritual performances, where an ordinary person would go into a state of mind, and maybe also enhance it with costumes and makeup and so forth, but transform themselves into an animal and, and become that animal for a period of time and go through maybe the life stages of the animals transformation of life and birth, life and death. And people would just watch that with big saucer eyes. Because there is something fascinating about that it's almost supernatural to see somebody transform. But we, we do gravitate towards that pattern.
Zack Arnold: Sure. And so then the addendum would be there's either transformation or lack of transformation. Yeah. And another thing you talk about, too, that you alluded to a little bit is that maybe the the main character of the hero doesn't transform, but they create transformation around them. I think, you know, the, the actual fully example in Beverly Hills Cop, which for our generation, we all know that story. We've got the younger generation Axel, who Beverly Hills was like, maybe they know about the remake, but you know, there's some form of transformation, even if it's not the hero, they might be creating it.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think we seek that as a desire for ourselves that we want to get out of a rut, we look to stories that, that promise that
Zack Arnold: which I think is what kind of where I want to go next. And then really dig into how do we apply this to our own lives. But to really get more existential, I want to talk a little bit about why As humans, we so desperately desire stories. It's not a matter of oh, look at all the shiny objects of we've got the Dolby Theatre and the screen. And now we love stories like, it's since cave paintings and dances and everything else. Stories are an integral part of who we are just going back to not just the hero's journey, and Joseph Campbell, but I know that a lot of your work is also informed by human psychology and Carl Jung, why is it that storytelling and stories are the way that we make sense of the world? Why is it so important to us?
Chris Vogler: Well, this one is a chicken and egg situation where you can't really ever get to because we don't have the right kind of time machines to do this. We can't go back and observe the moment when people figured out how to tell stories. I think there was an evolution of the brain that we grew a level of the brain at a certain point in evolution that maybe accidentally has this storytelling thing or maybe that was part of the design. I don't know. But it is a almost uniquely human ability. They say that there is some storytelling ability among some animals that dogs can communicate quite a bit. We just had a already this morning about it for dog that fell into a well, and his friend dog simply sat beside the hole in the ground and barked. And that dog was telling a story. And and so there's a little bit of a sense that it's beyond humans. But, you know, we seem to have developed a very sophisticated way of doing this. And I think the key to it is thinking metaphorically, and that that's how stories operate for us. And what they do for us is they give us comparisons. Every story is a metaphor. And since we are all, I think you can say this confidently, we are all profoundly self centered. We think it's about us, we think every story is really about us. And if it's not about us, then we're not interested in that story. You know, it's too remote, it's too distant. And, you know, you you'll hear this in critiques of art film sometimes that it just, it felt very remote to me, and I couldn't, I was not involved with the characters, and I was watching from a distance. So it's what that really means is it wasn't about me, and, or I couldn't find myself in it or find something to compare to my own situation. I know, just with music, that if I'm in the car, and scanning stations, and I come to a love song, or some song that's relevant to me, I can't help myself, I reach out and I turn it up, I turn the volume up, to get the message and I take stuff out of the lyrics of the song to go Oh, yeah, that's that's like in my life. That's like in my situation. And so you're always looking for this, you're thirsting for clues, and tips and hints about how to live better and improve your situation. And stories give us a fountain of that. And I think it's just part of the wonderful thing of being human that we enjoy, as I do with my wife, as we watch streaming shows. Every evening, we might talk for two or three days about a scene, you know, and go, Well, what did that mean? And how is it that like something that happened to us? So you're always relating things back to your own experience? We're kind of selfish, don't wait, but it's good for the movie business
Zack Arnold: Except for kind of selfish, we're, you know, I totally agree. Like you said, we're all inherently wired to be self centered just for a sense of self preservation and evolution, right, we always want to make it about us. The idea that stories are metaphors, I think is so important. And there's an additional line in your book that I want to quote that I think is so important to understanding why storytelling is such a vital skill, not just if you want to make a living as a writer or an editor, but if you just want to design a life that's more attuned to who you are, you say that the ideas and storytelling can be applied to understanding almost any human problem. We are problem solvers. And we use movies and television and music and all the various other art forms that tell stories to help us problem solve, right? It might be metaphorical, and it might be fictional. But there's some sense of truth in it, because the story is being told by another human being, and we use it to help problem solve ideas.
Chris Vogler: Yes, I definitely would go along with that. It was brought to my attention it very soon after I started lecturing and I took my memo and expanded that a little bit my seven page memo and made copies of it and sold those at writers conferences and found that there was a very thirsty audience, looking for some clues about structure, particularly Romance Writers, they were the ones who took to it most readily right off the bat. But people started coming up to me and saying, I, I'm not a screenwriter, I'm not a I'm not a romance writer. I'm a practical nurse. I'm a travel writer, I'm a I'm in training to be a policeman. I'm this that I'm a veteran, I'm this and that and the other. And I found everything you're saying was a very accurate reflection of what I went through training to be a nurse going to war, being a policeman, all these different walks of life. So the hero's journey pattern, I realized very quickly was describing something bigger than just how do you tell a nicer story and be a little more commercial. Somebody told me this, this was when I worked with some people who were in the justice system, working with couples that were splitting up. And they were trying to help them navigate through the families navigate through divorce. And they had found that this hero's journey pattern matched up with the things that were happening in their lives and actually gave them some roles to play of, I'm the hero, and I've got obstacles, and I have to overcome them. And what are the tricks that the heroes in the stories use, that I can use in my life, and one of the psychologists who was running this program said, You don't know this. But when you wrote that book, you did a social good. And unpacking that, I think what he meant I took it as a great compliment was that you've, you've identified something that, in some sense is real, and is useful. And it has applications in all these other disciplines. And so in this stage, I'm collecting those, and I'm fascinated by that. How many people from different walks of life, recognize it and say, You filled in three or four little blanks in my pattern, I already had some of it. And that's how I was I had some glimpses of the structure. But then when I met Campbell's ideas, it was like, oh, tic, tic, tic, tic tic, everything just fell into a nice structure. So I'm pleased to have found that application.
Zack Arnold: Well, I'm going to add to your collection, and I'm going to share what brought me to both you in this book is that I too, have been just trying to figure out my own journey in life, and have fairly recently in the last decade or so been making the transition from being a primarily Hollywood Film and Television editor, editing, TV shows, movies, trailers, and whatnot, realizing that I had a calling to do more, right, so my ordinary world if we're going to use this structure, my ordinary world was I spent most of my adult life making my living as a Hollywood film and television editor, realize there's a calling to do more. And I was refusing the call. Well, this is scary. I don't know how to do it. I'm not ready. I'm raging impostor syndrome, right. And then throughout this transition had been learning well, how do I surround myself with the right guides and mentors to learn the skills that I need to overcome all of the many tests and allies and enemies and obstacles literally deciding five years ago, I wanted to learn how to overcome physical obstacles by becoming an American Ninja Warrior. And in the process, what I discovered is that of all these areas, the area where I really specialize in I'm very, very good, is when somebody has the call to adventure, usually an innermost call to adventure like I had, where I have a calling to do something different, better or more. How do I connect with the guide or the mentor? And I couldn't quite help people understand the process of where they were in breaking down their story that I read the writers journey. I'm like, Duh, moron. Your job is to meet people at the refusal of the call, help them overcome the imposter syndrome. That is the inner most refusal, and answer the next question, how do I connect with and find the mentor, and I want to kind of walk you through my process, and you can just tear it apart. Or you can tell me that it works. But I want to walk you through how I'm using this structure, and then you can help me flesh it out more. So one of the discoveries that I found in helping hundreds of people connect with mentors and guides, whether it's somebody that just does a meeting with them over coffee, they become what I call their Miyagi mentor, because for me, the Karate Kid was my Star Wars. So it could be their Obi Wan mentor, or whatever it is, connecting people with others. So they can surround themselves with the guides and mentors that lead them along their journey. And I realized that when people are reaching out and connecting, they have no idea how to tell their stories. And kind of the fundamental discovery was that it's not that the people in the world don't want to help you. And so they don't know how to help you. And if you can better structure where you are in your own hero's journey, then people will say, Oh, I could potentially be your guide or your mentor, because I believe that by and large, even in Hollywood, most people want to help other people. So that's the structure that I've been using. And essentially when I asked them the question, where are you in your hero's journey? Here's how I pieced it together and you can tear this apart or tell me this is working or not. Here's where I am now. meaning, here's my ordinary world. Here's where I'm going next. This is my call to adventure and the journey that I'm on, here's what's stopping me. And where I need guidance and support. Here are my obstacles. So am I, am I doing your work in the structure justice? Or do you have notes?
Chris Vogler: Ah, no, I think that's a very good summary of the thing. Let me think about that for a sec. What my reaction is that this is a matter of meshing a need on the part of the students, let's call them and an emptiness in the mentor, the mentor has to have a space where the the mentee can come in. So they have to have a missing piece or a need that response to this need, and it may be blocked, and it may be hidden. But that's a wonderful thing. We love that when we see that in stories, when somebody let's say an older person has failed, or they've lost their faith. And then a young person comes along eagerly going, why you know how to do this, why don't you tell me how to do this, and they resist a little while, just like the heroes resist and refuse their call. But the mentor also gets a call to, to be involved. And it's wonderful and kind of magical. When those things do match up. I was lucky that way, I had a few mentors who took the time, or who just said, the few things, the main thing about a mentor is a gift. They they give the hero something reassurance, guidance, some words of wisdom or principles. All those things are forms of, of gifts. And that's a very strong bond when that when that happens, gifts, a very strong emotional value. So that's part of how that mentor thing works.
Zack Arnold: So now what I want to dig into next is really what we've kind of been building to this whole time is not just how do I apply the hero's journey to be a better writer, a better novelist, a better editor and storyteller, a better composer, a better director, all of which can very easily be done, and many are doing it successfully. But how do we apply it to our own lives? And I think that the the question where I want to start is how do we write great hero characters? And I don't mean on the page, I mean, what are the key core components? If I'm going to write a great character, that's my hero, and I'm the hero, what are some of the components that I need to really pay attention to, if I want to write a great story, where other people want to be involved in it?
Chris Vogler: Well, you know, here you are building a character. And I use that in two senses. And that's kind of what I'm studying right now is the whole business of character in the sense of the these personalities that we create our characters. But also, those characters have this thing called character, which is a set of characteristics, a set of tendencies or behaviors. And so you, you need to, when you create a character, start assembling a package, or maybe you make a list of the things you know about the character, that they're creative, that they're fearful, that they're friendly, that they're closed off, that they're ashamed, you know, you you fish around and get down as much as you can. But a key item in this list goes back to some earlier wound or disappointment, or failure. And it's kind of a truism in this world of storytelling, that every character has a scar, or a wound of some kind, from a past experience, and if they don't, and they're perfectly innocent, well, the scar is going to come pretty soon in the story. That may be one of the first things that happens, as in fairy tales, where everything's fine until the mother dies, and then the father, you know, finds another wife and she's, you know, the typical bad stepmother. And, you know, that's a bad cliche, but it is a shorthand way that that fairy tales have of saying something went wrong. And that is kind of a shadow that hangs on Over the character for the rest of the story, and it kind of raises a question, will they be able to overcome that. And I think the questions are vital for this business of connecting with the audience and getting them oriented. So they're on board, what you want is for them to identify with your main character, especially, they should identify in some way with all the characters, you kind of I like something about even the villain or there's something attractive or clever about almost every character, but with the main character, especially, it almost becomes you. There's they have enough similar characteristics, they might be wildly different from you, but there's something there that you can usually relate to and see in yourself. So what's happening to the hero is happening to you, and we try to hook up with questions like, will they get what they want? Will they discover what they need, those are two different things. And that's a major thing to understand I think about characters is they're driven by once, usually external things, I want to win, I want to get the treasure, I want to win love or something like that. But that usually masks something internal. And harder to pin down, which is I want respect and I, I want safety or i i need to belong to something, I need to be part of something, I need to have a real relationship, something that they may not acknowledge right away, but that the story teaches them. So it's it's an interaction between the hero in the story and I think the story is an active participant in this process. The story is almost like another character that arranges things so that the hero does learn what they need. And also, you know, you get what you asked for get what you want, usually, but in unexpected, twisted way. That's that's how the story has its fun and participates in the process. It says it listens to the hero saying I want love, I want to win. And it says okay, I'll give you that. But I'm going to give it to you in a twisted unexpected way. That's going to teach you a little lesson about what you really need. So the story, I think, is an active participant. It's a,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and what one of the key components here that's not just important, I think for just writing a great movie, a great TV show, but really in telling your own story is this idea that you said that they must be able to identify with your main character where it'll you almost become that main character. And in the real world, when I'm helping people connect with their fellow mentors or guides or figuring out their journey, there's something that I call the empathy factor, where if you're, if you're reaching out to somebody, when you tell your story and structure it, it's not, hey, I would like to get this job again, you pass along my resume or share this, it's here's where I am in my journey. And the more vulnerable you are, and the more you share your struggles, the more the right person says, oh my god, that was me five years ago, I remember those days. Well, now that I understand where you need help, I can provide that help and support, because you're on the same journey that I was I'm just further along, which triggers that empathy. So I think you're so right. And that not just in writing great characters. But in writing your self as a hero, you need to put yourself in the right people where they can identify with you and empathize with your journey and your struggle. And there's two other things that I want to pull right out of your book that I think are so essential and obvious for a character your writing, but are just as obvious and essential when you're writing yourself rewriting your story where you are the hero, you say that in order to be invested in any story, we have to know what the main character wants, and what drives them, right? What is their motivation. And also, your characters have to be real to you before they can be real to an audience, which to me is authenticity. So I always tell people that you can't just kind of fake it and put yourself out there and hope that you get what you want. But you also can't just, you know, make it all about you and well, whatever. As opposed to here's why I'm motivated to do this. Because people are driven and invested in other people's stories because their motivations are similar, and they connect with people that are more authentic. So how can we with ourselves or even if we're just writing a character, really focus on making sure that motivation is clear, and we're staying authentic to ourselves?
Chris Vogler: Well, on the first point, about needing to know what the character wants or wishes for. This became clear to me when I sat in on a friend's class he was teaching at Columbia in New York. screenwriting class. And we read the first 10 pages of everyone's script and had a table reading and assigned parts and so forth. And I noticed that some of the scripts had great dialogue, clever characters, interesting plot situation. But I was absolutely on engaged and not attached until somebody, usually the main character said, you know, I wish or I didn't, I want to find, I want to, you know, I want or wishes when those magic words were spoken, suddenly, I'm in it, because I know, where's the arrow of this story headed? And so I begin to want that for the if I like the character, if I've accepted them, I want them to be happy, and or want them to get what they want or what they deserved. So that that's absolutely necessary for for connecting with the audience. And then what was the second part?
Zack Arnold: It was the idea of both the motivation, but also the authenticity.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, authenticity. I don't know about that. I think I go here to some screenwriting teachers I've had, who said, you know, you might want to write about the Medici family in the 14th century. But why don't you put that aside, and or your first couple of scripts, write about something that's coming up from the hot asphalt of your own soul, you know, and give me something, it might be a tiny little story about how you stood up to a bully or something. But you'll, you'll find more juice in that. And it's an interesting thing I observe watching. streaming shows that sometimes, you'll be watching the show, and it's fanciful. And that could happen. And that's ridiculous. And then suddenly, a scene comes along and just slaps you, and you go, that must have happened to him or someone like him, like, my wife and I are watching very behind the curve, but we're watching Breaking Bad. And every night, we get another dose,
Zack Arnold: How lucky are you to be able to watch that show for the first time, I would erase my memory to have that ability to watch it again, for the first time.
Chris Vogler: It was a great thing to set it aside and ignore it until later and then go through it. Now, and I am desperate not to have any spoilers and know what what's going to happen. But we had that reaction that either Vince Gilligan or somebody on his team must have had cancer, or they knew someone who had that particular type of cancer, because all of this stuff, and we have it in the family. So we recognize these things, and knew that that has the slap of authenticity, there's even a German word for this called Air liveness, which means list. It's a lived experience. And you can tell when when a scene comes along like that, even if it's about Domenici family, in the 1400s. It'll stand up and have more of a spine. You know, your imagination is great. And they can come up with very convincing things where you think that you've been through the plague or something. But you sort of know, when somebody has gone inside and pull out a wire from their own tangled story. And, and we value that, you know, that's that's treasure.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And what I found two kind of going connecting both this idea of authenticity, going back to making sure that we're engaged with the character, we see ourselves in them. And there's this empathy factor. When I first started doing the podcasting, and the writing years ago, when I was still editing full time, and this was like a hobby, instead of kind of becoming a full time, both obsession and way to make a living. It started with I have discovered this elixir, I have cracked the code, if you want to be healthy at your workstation, or whatever it is, here's the answer. Nobody listened. It was like, Who is this guy telling us how to live our lives. And then what changed is I wrote a blog article that really I had no intention of it becoming anything but it was all about this idea. And this was 10 years ago now about I call that a classic case of post production burnout. And it was just me writing a diary entry about me experiencing burnout and depression and the overwhelm of the industry. And the reaction was, oh my God, nobody talks about this. And oh my god, this is me too. And somebody I was talking about it. And then I realized I was telling the wrong story. Before the hero was, I am impervious, and I am impenetrable. And I'm invincible. And here's the elixir to be superhuman yourself. And then I realized, no, I need to have flaws, and I need to be vulnerable. Yeah, my ordinary world was one of misery and long hours and burnout, right. But I've now found that as I'm on my journey, I'm making these new discoveries. And I'm pulling myself out of the cave, and I'm learning how to handle the test and the allies and the enemies. So I'm still on my journey, I'm still in the trenches. But if you come along with me, I can empathize with where you might be, and I can help you along. Once I learned how to structure my story. With that authenticity, and that vulnerability, the game changed.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, I hear that, I will use a phrase, you'll hear this in my lectures, I'll say, I'm going to burden you with a, an embarrassing personal anecdote, and I'll tell some story about myself. And it has a magic effect of relieving the audience of this tension about I'd have to get everything down. And he's the expert and all that. It brings me down to earth. And I started doing this. Almost immediately after the book was published. The book was a magic carpet. And it took me traveling all over the world, because it was translated into, thankfully, translated into many languages and was invited a lot of places. And my first trip was to Spain. And I found myself I mean, it was comical, how precisely I was being led through this ordeal of hero's journey, things exactly as I had described in my book, in an abstract theoretical way, but here it was, in reality, I was, you know, in the test allies and enemies phase, I'm in Spain, I don't know how the money works. I don't know how light switch works. I don't know how to open a box of orange juice, because it's a different principle. And some people look nice, and they're not. And some people don't look nice, and they are nice. And you know, all of my I was like Dorothy, and in us, I was completely disoriented, and met a moment in the middle of my first trip to Spain, that was a true hero's journey, this is going to end up very badly, and I'm going to either fail or die or lose my passport or wreck my car. And I got through that and was transformed by it. And, you know, I just was amused by how exactly that followed my own pattern. And that convinced me to be more personal in my presentations and to bring out this sort of thing. One of my sort of standard, reliable, tear jerker stories is about getting lost in the woods. And following this hero's journey pattern to a revelation that was that was very helpful about trusting the path that you just keep marching and the road is there. A lot of people have been on it before you, but if you trust it, you'll you'll come out. Okay.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And I'm glad you said that, because I know that's an integral part of everything you teach is this idea. And this should literally be on a poster framed in front of just about everybody's computers around the ceiling above their bed, trust the path, which sounds great. It's an amazing Instagram, platitude card to post your followers. But the big question is, how how do I trust the path, especially in Hollywood, as you know, it's so completely unknown? If I go on Google, and I type in how to become a doctor, I know in 15 seconds, what the steps are to become a doctor. But how do I trust the path when everybody's paths are different?
Chris Vogler: Yeah, that's that was a tough one. I noted that difference in professions that, you know, there are steps to becoming a lawyer and there's a test and you know, so forth, certification and so on. But there is no such thing. It's, it's really up to you to give yourself the degree to give yourself the the official certification. So you take that, take that onto yourself.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that's, that's one of the services that I'm trying to provide is a little bit more structure and let everybody know that you are going to have a unique path everybody else, but there is somewhat of a formula that if you follow foundational steps, and part of that formula is the hero's journey, knowing this is what's coming next and it's not unknown and you're not the only person it's ever been tested. We're dealt with allies or enemies, you're like, Oh, this is actually me on the path as opposed to me getting off the path, trying to help them develop those fundamental skills and steps to handle the the obstacles and recognize where they are. Which kind of brings me to this next question, which I'm not sure it's an easy one to answer. And I certainly don't have the answer. And you may not, but I just want to workshop it. If somebody is going through and listen to this, they go through and they read more about the different stages in the hero's journey. Can you provide a fairly simple way? To answer the question? How do I know what stage I'm at? How do we figure that out?
Chris Vogler: Well, I think you, you have to check in with your, your feelings and your instincts there. Especially about crossing thresholds, which actually, I've mentioned it once, but it comes up a couple of times in this idea of the hero's journey, Campbell talks about it, that there's a threshold going into the special world, and there's a threshold coming out of this special world. And then at the end, another one. So maybe there's four or five, at the very beginning, you enter the story, you cross a threshold, when you decide to get involved in the issue, you cross it another When you face your fears, you cross another one, you decide, Okay, it's time to finish. And then when it's done, that's another door that you can go through to the next stage. So I think it has to do with, if you can step back a little bit from that edge from that threshold that you're at, to see, well, how big a journey is this that will help you determine roughly what stage you're in? Am I at the beginning, and I have like 24 more obstacles ahead? Or am I nearly done, and I just have that very hard. But simple in a way, last choice to make you encounter that in the editing room. That you you cut it a bunch of different ways. And then you get it pretty much like you like it. But there's the last shot or you know, maybe two or three frames that can make all the difference. But you have the feeling that I'm I'm just about done. And I just have to work through this last this last bit. So I think that maybe helps answer that question is if you can, if you can pull yourself up to the moon and look down at it, you maybe have a better sense of of how many stages are ahead of me? Or is that something I can't deal with? Or no right now. And I just have to make a little short story out of this. And just get out of this particular scene that I'm in or act in my life.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of identifying the thresholds and kind of zooming out and where this goes next. Maybe it's the second part of the same question. Maybe it's a new question. But I think that if we're going to look at the structure of a TV series, it can be very similar to the structure of life, because it's not just one journey, right? You have like for us as humans, there's one ultimate hero's journey. We're born we live we die, right? But then there are a multitude of other ones in there. And if we were to look at a TV series, you have the arc of the whole show, you have the first frame of episode one and the pilot, the last frame of the series finale, right? That's the life of the character, but then it's broken up into seasons. And then it's broke up and then put in episodes, and then sequences and then scenes. So the obvious is the ultimate Hero's Journey is we're born we live we die. But then it seems to me we can also break it down to well, you know, one completed Hero's Journey is childhood. Another one is adulthood. And other one is, you know, kind of the the senior years or the golden years. So if we're going to step back, it's kind of like, first of all, what season would I be in and what what would this episode be, but then it gets even more complicated. And as an editor, this is really a big struggle was for me for a long time, but for a lot of younger editors is understanding that there's not just the hero's journey for the whole season or whole episode, there's a hero's journey from start to finish in most scenes, right? You have a three act structure from the beginning of a scene to the end of a scene and it's just like Inception of inception of inception. So how can we apply this general structure of a series for example, to break down even more clearly if we zoom out where am I in my journey or which journey am I on?
Chris Vogler: Yeah, this whole idea of structuring a long work it came up because most of my time in the business was spent looking at the 90 minute to two hour idea that that was what I was tasked to do was to evaluate things that would be a normal theatrical movie, but it's a whole new game. And now you have to think in terms of these bigger arcs and levels of magnification, you're, you're going from close up of one little scene, is he going to tell the truth? Is he going to break? Is he going to manage to plant the bomb? Or whatever it is? And then bigger thing? Will he overcome his resistance to getting involved with the group that might take a whole season to work out? And then the whole show is about? Will the person will their way of life be changed? And that was helpful for me to think of it in terms of those questions? Will he? Will she tell the truth? In the little scene? In the episode, will he get out of the gym that he's in? In the season? Will she find the proper mate that she's looking for? And in the end? Will their way of life be destroyed? Or will they be able to preserve it? If you look at something like Downton Abbey, you are breaking bad, or you know, any long running show, that's a good way to break it down is by the level of magnitude of those questions. And I think a good way to think about this is in a spiral form, that the stories and people's lives go in a spiral sort of pattern where, okay, I went to high school, and that was a whole journey, okay, then I went into the military, that was a whole journey three or four years now. And I went into film school that I was two or three years, and so forth. And then my first job at Disney was, uh, you know, another merry go round. And, you know, you get spit out at the end of those and pick yourself up and go to another one. But each one seems to go around the same circle, or follows the same railroad track. And you see the same general kind of stations over and over again. And this is kind of the question for all of us is, am I learning anything? And am I just making the same mistakes over and over again, and I hope, you know, that I'm learning and that my performance is getting better.
Zack Arnold: I love that. So the reason that I love doing podcasting is that I if I had to pick one identity, and I wear a whole lot of different hats, but if I had to pick one identity, it's teacher. I was born and raised surrounded by teachers, I love educating, I love teaching, and I love inspiring. And my hope is that many of my students come away inspired by a new idea, or a concept or a thought of which I think you've shared many. But I just want to share very quickly that if this wasn't a giant AHA lightbulb moment for everybody else, you just dropped a game changer for me, which is visualizing the stages of our lives as a spiral. That had never occurred to me. And I've always I tried just like you do. I tried to take really complex ideas and break them into very simple framework, so they're usable for people. And I've never been able to visualize because I'm a very visual learner and teacher, how do I visualize the hero's journey? And as you were talking, I was already thinking, I need to email my 3d designer, and I need to talk to him about how do I visualize the various stages of our career and our journeys in life as a spiral, like that was a game changer. And I cannot wait to extrapolate that into a very teachable lesson, because that was just like a huge aha moment for me.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, it resonates for me and memory. I'm thinking about different times when I would come around on one of these paths. And I would go, you know, this is familiar. I've been through something like this before, and I can't even remember right now what it was, but why this seems familiar. And then we come to me, oh, yeah, I've confronted this kind of devil before. I've been in this kind of jam before. They get oh, yeah, I had this technique or way. A lot of this. And I think this is speaking to your calling, as as a teacher and a helper is dealing with fear, and it it kept coming back up again on the spiral. So that I eventually developed techniques for dealing with that and one of them is simply to acknowledge, acknowledge, I'm afraid, you know, which we do. don't want to say, we have a fear of saying we're afraid. And so just acknowledging I'm afraid, is a big you relax, you breathe better, as soon as you say that. And then you develop a relationship with fear. You almost personify it. And you say, Oh, I know what you are. That's stopping me. You are funny old, Mr. Fear. I know you. And you know what, I'm not afraid of you because I faced you before. And you know, you didn't stop me and you tried. Maybe you headed me off for some good experience I should have had and I'm sorry, I listened to you. And I'm not listening to you now. So you get a dialogue going with your own hesitations and fears and, and just naming the thing, fear gives you a little bit of mastery over instead of this, like, I don't know, I feel weird about this. And I can't put words to it. It just that simple act is powerful.
Zack Arnold: Man, you should double as a therapist, because that right, there's this digging right into the heart of what so many people deal with far beyond how do I write a better screenplay is how do I acknowledge and confront fear because ultimately, you develop and master the skill of acknowledging and confronting fronting your fears, you can accomplish just about anything. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's a metaphor, not just for writing but a metaphor for life.
Chris Vogler: Yes, it is. Yeah. This is great. Yeah, I just saw a good documentary that Jonah Hill did with a therapist.
Zack Arnold: I've heard about this.
Chris Vogler: Yeah, it's very good. And the therapist has a number of tools that he uses. And one of them is something he calls part x. And part x is what I call funny mystery fear. It's whatever stopping you whatever shadow is in shame you have or ideas about yourself that are limiting. That's what he calls part x. And he has a way of, maybe I made this up in my head, but but you can take that x and turn it into a plus sign if you just the picture a little bit. And I love working that way, with very, very simple images. A lot of my PowerPoint shows are often two slides, one slide shows the a possibility, and then it's flipped or reversed in the second, an example of that is the idea of focus, I show a slide that shows an empty stage. And it's got about 18 lights shining all over the place. And this represents your ambition as a writer to tell everything I want to put it all in there until you know the whole history of the world. But the next slide is all those lights have been brought together into one beam to one spot on the stage. And that's focus. So when you take all of these, you know, competing idea, ideas are competing for attention, and you limit them and focus them down to one theme or one basic central idea. You get this staggeringly different effect and sort of scattered all over the place. It's all drawing your attention to one point. So this, I mean, we should stay in touch about these simple graphic ways of getting across kind of profound principles.
Zack Arnold: I love it, you're you and I are gonna have to talk about my triple tornado technique. It's a three dimensional representation of using tornadoes to answer the question, what is the perfect dream job that is going to fulfill me in my life creatively. I won't get into it now. But I've working on a three dimensional diagram and like, but I think you and I think very, very similarly, really difficult concept. How do we visualize it in a simple metaphor and give you simple steps that you can follow? So we're, it must be the farm boys in us? I don't know what it is. But it must be the farm boys.
Chris Vogler: But there's your there's your spiral, the tornado,
Zack Arnold: right? That's exactly what I was thinking like, my my metaphor is a spiral is slightly different. But you're right, it's a tornado is a spiral too. So I want to be respectful of your time of which I have not because we're already five minutes over. But frankly, this conversation has been so engaging, and I've been looking forward to it for so long that I just wanted to let you keep talking and really enjoy this. What I would like for my audience to know now if they want to dig deeper into your work and they want to become better storytellers. What's the easiest way for them to be able to do that?
Chris Vogler: Well, I think the best thing is to to go to the book because I did you know have sort of pour everything into that The Writer's Journey. There's a second book called Memo From The Story Department, which I co wrote with a friend of mine who was also a script, reader. And there, I put an additional pile of principles and things to draw from some of its from the old Greek way of thinking about drama, which I've studied a lot and enjoy mining for good ideas, some of its from vaudeville, and from just general life experience. But those two sources, Memo From The Story Department and The Writer's Journey, are the best way I also have a WordPress blog, that I frequently will post things there. But there's some interesting backlog of stuff. They're about different projects I've worked on and adventures that I've had. So those are some some starting points.
Zack Arnold: Well, I can already tell you, for 100% fact that this is going to be an interview that I share is foundational educational content, literally for years to come. So excited to finally have this in the can and chat with you and really, really hope that our paths cross cross, whether it's at an industry event, or you know, whether I'm bringing you in as a guest speaker at an event that I'm creating whatever it is, I really look forward to the moment when you and I can meet in person and talk in the language of spirals and visuals and shapes and everything else because I think that we have a lot in common there. But I can't thank you enough for sharing your expertise and your time with our audience today. So thank you so much, Chris. Appreciate it.
Chris Vogler: Always a pleasure. Thank you very much Zack and you're doing good work. You're doing a social good man. So keep at it
Zack Arnold: Appreciate that. Thank you
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.
The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).
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