WaitWhat
Creativity. It’s as mysterious and elusive to humans as love. We stalk it. We crave it. We try to bring it out in ourselves.
How to spark others: Yo-Yo Ma on the Silk Road Project
The Silk Road Project was an impossibly ambitious, creatively expansive idea to not only create a category of music that had never been heard before, but also create ensembles to perform it, and audiences who were hungry to hear it. How did Yo-Yo Ma build this vision? He knew from the beginning that it wasn’t about him.
Stick with it: "The Queen's Gambit" producers Allan Scott and Bill Horberg
When you fall in love with a project, stay with it – for as many years as necessary. Its time will come. When screenwriter Allan Scott acquired the film rights to the Walter Tevis novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” he couldn’t have imagined it would take almost 30 years to get that movie made.
Stay authentic to yourself: Randall Park on making "Always Be My Maybe"
How do you create something an audience will love? Start with everything YOU love.
Create the conditions for your own creativity: Yaa Gyasi on "Transcendent Kingdom"
To make a creative leap, get to know your creative self. After publishing a blockbuster first novel, "Homegoing," followed by a year of touring (and trying to write in hotel rooms), author Yaa Gyasi realized she needed two things to reconnect with her next story: space and time.
Cultivate a child's sense of wonder: "Knives Out" director Rian Johnson
How do you create deeply imaginative work? There’s a method behind the magic. As Rian Johnson (Last Jedi, Looper, Brick) takes us on the journey of joyfully reinventing the murder-mystery, you’ll hear the way he draws on childhood memories (like watching Agatha Christie movies in his grandparents' rambling old house) to inspire his work.
Oscar winner Pixar's Kemp Powers on "Soul": The best person for the project
How do you create an authentic character? Start with your authentic self. When Kemp Powers joined the writers' room at Pixar, he found a story waiting to be told ... anchored within his own story.
Susan Orlean on The Orchid Thief and its feature adaptation, Adaptation
Episode Two: Susan Orlean tells the wild and true story behind her famed book, The Orchid Thief, how she embedded herself in the search for mythical orchids, and how that story turned into a fictionalized movie called Adaptation.
Chip Kidd on the cover of Jurassic Park
Episode Three: Chip Kidd discusses his dream assignment – creating the book cover for a soon-to-be blockbuster written by Michael Crichton. Of course now we all know that to be Jurassic Park, but in his own words, Chip covers how he got started and how he got unstuck until he created the very perfect thing.
