i'm sam sachs in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and tonight we bring you a special edition of the big picture we'll be revisiting two previous conversations with great minds had recently one with award winning filmmaker tom shadyac another with m.s. in b.c. host and author chris hedges and we begin tonight with tom's conversation with tom shadyac the man behind such films as a splinter a pet detective the nutty professor and bruce almighty and this conversation chidiac talks about what motivated him to hang up all the fame and fortune making blockbuster movies to pursue a more meaningful project trying to find out what's wrong with the world how we can fix it and ultimately how we can be happier those are questions that aren't going

away anytime soon so here it is tom's conversations with great minds with filmmaker tom shadyac. conversations with great minds i'm joined by renowned filmmaker tom shadyac he's been a director a producer a screenwriter an actor a comedian you name it he's done it and his movies are some of the most widely recognized films in the last few decades from ace ventura pet detective series to the nutty professor movies to liar liar and bruce almighty his most recent film he takes us on a journey in search of the nature of humanity and what it means to live a truly fulfilling life on this planet topic will definitely get into a little later in the interview currently is a professor of communications and teaches screenwriting pepperdine university seaver college i'm pleased to welcome from our studios in los angeles tom shadyac

welcome. tom it's great to be here and just for a point of clarification the class i teach at pepperdine is actually called film and life because it's a conversation that i don't think we have with our youth which is we use films as an access point to start a conversation about the sit ins and choices that our youth are going to make. in their in when they graduate from college and when they move on with their lives so that's the conversation that i also wanted to start with i am just reflected that in the class i teach well it's fascinating and it's kind of. robert mckee comes home to my life i don't think it's the the notion of the story as a person. how did you get it how did you get out of that how did that come about. well i've always been a teacher in my heart i taught acting for years at a studio called the vincent chase workshop and vincent chase is now one of the characters on entourage they named the lead actor after me so renowned and i just

enjoyed teaching and they called one day after i had done the film bruce almighty and pepperdine is a spiritually based school so they thought i would make a fun professor to come teach the kids you know the art of showbusiness so i started with a screenwriting class but i have volved into this larger conversation because i felt such a hunger from the students again about these choices that they were making the pressures that they were feeling and that's really what the class turned into it it's kind of a therapy session for all of us we talk about what's going on in the news in their hearts the pressures that they're feeling we try to you know disembarking those pressures and really break them down and see what's underneath them that's remarkable you've had some head films that include bruce almighty liar why are these and ensure a pet detective series movie series you've collaborated with eddie murphy to write the nutty professor movie series directed patch adams starring robert william or robyn williams dragon-fly with kevin costner you were an executive producer at the

a.b.c. t.v. series eight simple rules for dating my teenage daughter what have you learned from the breath of experience. well i've learned how important storytelling is in the human experience you know madeleine l'engle is a famous author she wrote a wrinkle in time and she said jesus was not a theologian he was god amongst us who told stories and i think storytelling is as old as the human species i think we used to sit around a fire and we used to talk about the day and and it's how we learned to be human how we learned to walk. more empathetically more productively and so i've learned about the power of storytelling and you know i've just toured america with the film i am and you would think that some of my later films would be the ones that have really are the films that are more memorable from bruce almighty to patch adams but i tell you it's the simplicity of making a human being laugh ace ventura no matter where i go old and young that's the film

that they bring up and that's simply about human connection it's just simply about being childlike and laughing and i think there's a power there you know i think the greatest story any of us will ever tell is the story we tell with our lives so i don't just want to be a filmmaker who tells stories i hope that i can walk the principles that i care about in my own life you know one of the things the speaking of storytelling one of the things that i find most fascinating as as a guy who's written six novels and taken screenwriting classes and whatnot is that in the when you're taught the art of storytelling it's always about how the character changes you know five part story structure inciting incident progressive complications crisis climax resolution all that and at that point of crisis and climax the character has to change in the in the in the most profound movies we have the character changes yet and i think that that's the thing that draws everybody to fiction to novels and movies and yet in most people's lives there is

no change there's very little change might that be why people are so drawn to movies. yes i do i think it's a way. so that the finger doesn't get pointed so accusingly at us so we can see through an imperfect character like bruce nolan and bruce almighty we can see our own selfishness reflected where the fact that we might not tell the truth as often as we'd like to which was fletcher reed in liar liar and that enables us to then have a conversation about that where we don't need to be defensive and we can see ourselves reflected in those characters and we can change that there's a very middle of this put mary oliver she's a she's a friend of mine and mary says we do one thing or the other we stay the same or we change congratulations if you've changed and i think change is the most wonderful thing people say where are you going to be ten years from now and i say i have no idea but i hope i've changed yeah that's that's that's profound i was amazed to

discover that at the age of twenty four you were the youngest staff joke writer ever for comedian bob hope the guy was and i cry what was that like yeah well as i describe it it's kind of like being a doctor on call we didn't have cell phones in those days but somehow mr hope was able to track us down wherever we were whether i was with friends on a ski slope on a weekend or in a restaurant mr hope would always seem to find us and he would tell us that he needed jokes that evening because he was speaking with you know at the dinner for the queen of england at the annenberg estate so we had to keep up with the news and always learn to twist that phrase and and sort of supply him you know with the jokes for the day you've worked with some extraordinary people i mean you know from bob hope to robyn williams to. break or suspect that we've been talking about here . what who are the people that you have learned

from what you know are there any are there any of these people that you have worked with that the you personally have taken away something that you've brought into your own life. well listen i've learned from everybody i've learned so much about the exacting specific creative nature of every moment from the from a jim carrey life itself i would have to say the greatest teacher for me in show business was i worked with a gentleman who played god. his name was morgan freeman and i think we all wanted to give him the role of god in human form for a reason because he's so wise and after i did the film bruce almighty with him i went out to dinner with him and asked him what he believed said we put words words in your mouth is god what tell me what you believe morgan and morgan is so wise and well thought he turned me onto a book he started with ishmael by daniel quinn which actually led me to utah and

last hours of ancient sunlight and it really shook my paradigm you know here i was thinking that you know we humans had it kind of figured out and we were on a path that was good and positive and that shook me at the very core it's what ray anderson called hit called the spirit of the chest and that changed me deeply and when i began to apply the principles that i learned from that book which work in nature to my own life in terms of my economic life it changed everything because as i say in the film i am i realize that nothing in nature takes more than it needs and everything in nature is in cooperation everything that thrives in the long run in nature is in cooperation and that i in my own economic life was operating outside of those principles because i've been taught to take everything that i could get i'm a director i'm more valuable than you and more valuable than anyone else on a movie set and so i should get more and i realized that that is really rooted in a cancerous idea and i think it's the foundational reason why we have

a lot of the problems in the world you know it's creating a separation and really the foundational notion in the book. ishmael and in your book last hours of ancient sunlight is this idea that human beings have separated themselves not only from the natural world the from each other and separation as einstein said is an illusion there's no real end to me in beginning of you and it's all connected we know that now through the sciences through the entanglement theories from quantum physics and others and other theories and and that theory that philosophy of separation has to be rethought because the ultimate reality is connection you know the mystics and our philosophers simply sum it up this way are we brothers and sisters or not and if we're brothers and sisters we ought to take care of each other as brothers and sisters we ought to take what we need and then share and i believe that's how you build a truly wealthy life that wealth is not defined by how much i have accumulated but

how much i have been able to to share how much creativity i'm able to share how much love i'm able to share and if you have an abundance of resources to let those flow through you to create more community and more creativity and more education so that was you know morgan started me on that path of course i was always a seeker but morgan started me on that path very directly when i read ishmael again which led me to you and others and really sort of unraveled one way of being and opened up an entirely new way of being which has brought me much more joy much more contentment and much more of a sense of meaning and community and purpose you are speaking of spirituality and the. experience you had reading these books dan quinn i know dan quinn he describes himself as an animist i would call myself if somebody you know forced me to define i would define myself as something close to a christian pantheist. and to have have you given any thought to.

realize definitions and boxes are awkward things but you know how i have. how would you define your spirituality or your worldview or do you even separate the two or do you or. your place. well i can't i can't separate my spirituality from my worldview they're one in the same. and i do believe definition is the death of discovery so as soon as i say i'm a buddhist a christian a jew you put me in a box and that defines me and i don't want that box. but you know we all believe all of our face believe in the omnipresence of whatever you call god or the spirit or life and so if if the spirit is omnipresent that means it's everywhere that means it is in that tree this this this creative beautiful force again that we label god it is in my neighbor it's even in my enemy which is why the mystics and again our philosophers have said you must love your enemy you must do good to those

who hate you and so so often what i see on the news from a judeo christian nation which espouses those beliefs in church i don't see us walking those things and this is not the point the finger out but i believe each of us has to heal those own things in our lives before we find fault with our brother your students must because love your class we're talking with tom shadyac we'll have more with tom shadyac in our conversations with great minds right after this break. just burn gerard's right right i mean it's like a derivative of actual pepper it's a food product essentially. this is much stronger than anything if you buy a lot of the loses thousands of times was stronger than any kind of you ever put you know.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know. welcome to the big picture.

welcome back i'm speaking with filmmaker tom shadyac a man behind a number of well known films including ace ventura pet detective the nutty professor liar liar and his most recent film i am tom let me set this segment up by just sharing a short clip from i am with our viewers here it is and i took a chance on a guy who at the time was known as the white guy on in living color. my world changed overnight. and well i kind of went shopping. first i bought

a little seven thousand square foot house in the hills of several swimming pools movie stars. trying to make sure that a professor liar. with more success came my way i bought a bigger house and more stuff. but something odd happened to me when i moved into my first beverly hills house that kind of took the edge off my buzz i was standing alone in the entrance foyer after the movers had just left and i was struck with one very clear very strange feeling i was no happier. there i was standing in the house and my culture had taught me was a measure of the good life and it made me absolutely no happier it's pretty remarkable tom you went from those homes to living in a mobile home community albeit a very nice one to malibu but nonetheless a mobile home community. tell us about about that.

well i think that clip sets it up really nicely is that i was i was sold the paradigm if you will i was sold the idea that success looked a certain way that it looked like a home and you know i started eight thousand square foot home in beverly hills and i moved to a seventeen thousand square foot three home seven acre compound in pasadena and that's what success looked like and that there was an arrival point and when you arrived you were there and i found that there was no there there and i began to see you know those things that we know that we know but somehow we behave differently that things don't make you any happier they can bring you a little chocolate high but they they don't give you long term feelings of contentment and fulfillment so i began to call it into question you know when i talk about it with my friends and i begin to simplify my life and i realize how many how much excessive resources i was using

a single guy living in this much square footage yes i had friends over but the energy i was using i was flying privately and it wasn't who i wanted to be i had always wanted to be so much who would tell stories and be a personality and a person that helped to heal the world and to bring us together and i do believe we're all in this together i do believe in the principles of jesus and gandhi and martin luther king and then i looked at my life and i thought. isn't it harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven and then i realized well the kingdom of heaven is here and so these things outside don't help the kingdom of heaven which is here and so i could feel that my own heart my own life was not being elevated by these things and so i moved into other areas i moved into a simpler place and remember for me i had heard that the idea of simplicity brought . they say there are three keys a spiritual of simplicity simplicity simplicity and simplicity brought me

a kind of joy a kind of peace there was less on my back less the worry. about if you will less bills that pay more resources could go to others and i discovered something that was. just remarkable for me which was the beauty of community because i live again it's a beautiful mobile home park but my neighbors are right there you know in mansions in the states you got to keep the neighbors out here you can't help but to invite the neighbors in i can i could literally ask them to pass the salt. and i discovered this wonderful eclectic group of people that are now my family and so i really am kind of a walking happiness study i'm a petri dish for happiness and so i'm so passionate about teaching young people that there may be another way than what your culture is telling you that when you look at the list you know that whether it's the magazine or business week or newsweek that says here are the wealthiest americans these are the top one hundred that that does not mean it is not a one to one ratio that means they are the happiest in fact it might mean that they

are even less happy because we know that after your basic needs are met more resources resources can actually complicate your life and make you less happy so those things are what i talk about because i've found them to be true in my own life i only want to talk about what's true the truth is what moves me and what animates me and my experience has been profound and it's something we see in literature because of the buddha left wealth in st francis left wealth and they found a beauty and a connection and i think that's what we've lost i really think it goes back to that idea of separation that when we get too much that we are able to separate ourselves out from the most important things in life which is the basic human need the connection of love where i say to someone as a neighbor i need you i don't have everything i can't separate myself out from you i need you i'm one of you. and so i think that wealth does

can tend to pull us away from that unless we're very careful it's why the saying. from where our ralph waldo emerson while i sit on the cushion of advantage i fall asleep and i do believe there's a malays that comes when and the disconnection that comes when wealth unable to stand on top rather than being down in the meat and marrow of community in life the movie i am your most recent film the you just finished touring around the country you interviewed scientists religious leaders environmentalist philosophers desmond tutu noam chomsky limit taggart elisabeth's satoris howard's and others. in that movie the the arc of the movie kind of seems like you started with this accident and injury and that led you to all of this transformation and yet everything i'm hearing from you and this isn't contradicted contradicting that but everything i'm hearing from you is sounds like almost a lifetime spiritual study was that absolute starting point or just

a transition point leading you to make the movie and what and in either case what provokes this this brilliant documentary. well the bike accident where i got post-concussion syndrome and felt i wasn't going to survive that provoked me to make this film and the film i had to to do a film like this i needed a fair amount of courage to speak about what i had been experiencing questioning changing in my life over the past decade ten twelve fifteen years so you're right it's been a long journey you know i've always even as a boy i just wanted to know what was true and over the past ten twelve years i began shifting my life because i felt that my life was out of balance that i was participating with the ills of the world rather than helping to heal them so i don't know if i would have had that had the courage i say it knocked me from my head what better. accident to have than to hurt your head to knock you from your

head into your heart and so i got out of my head which the culture had trained and i got into my heart which i believe was more connected organically with life what you have or you call the god creative force and so it was simply that courage needed it knocked me into that courage to talk about this film but i had been changing i was already in the mobile home park i was already teaching i was already discovering in awakening the community i was sharing more of my resources i was retooling the way i do economy in my life i simply now take what i need when i do a film and then whatever other resources come in for that film automatically go into account for the common good and i believe i want to be again an experiment if you will a different model that when we look at the end of that life you'll see i hope a life that really was built around true wealth and not this false wealth when we get to our graves we and we are death beds and we say what was that all about i feel like i know what it's about right now and it's about how can i contribute you

know to this society it's funny i watch t.v. all the time and i see one side of the debate and i'm in the consumers of liberal or conservative but i see see i. one side of the bait that just misses that point of true wealth how do we motivate people if you don't have money at the end of it and i say well how was jesus motivated i was gonna motivate out my motivated i'm so motivated by the fact that i can add a value to this community that i can help to educate a child what more motivation do i need that someone may need an operation and possibly a resource that i can help with i could help them meet that medical need i don't understand how we've gotten to this place where money is the motivator that we teach our kids and yet we know the most valuable things in life have nothing to do with money once our basic needs are met so that you know that's what i'm hoping to to again a story that i want to tell with my life i'm a storyteller i'll still make movies but the most powerful story will be the one

that i share and tell with my life i understand from your bio tom that you you were born on the east coast and if you grew up here in virginia in this neighborhood but . i understand you opened a homeless shelter in charlottesville. yeah i did we shot evan almighty and i went to school at the university virginia and university region is you know as a college does saying can you help us and i said well i think you're endowed and i looked around the community and i met a beautiful woman named joy johnson who was in touch with the homeless of charlottesville and i asked her about what the community needed and the community was fighting for a living wage can you imagine that in a community as wealthy as charlottesville we're still not supporting people to the level where they can actually make it and when you do the math it just doesn't work you know for a janitor to to serve us at our schools they can't make it so i got involved with joy in the community of charlottesville and we ended up i purchased

a church which i have given back to the community and it's now a homeless day shelter and a community center they can use the church for free for weddings or for music and dance events and then that the community interacts with the homeless it's a beautiful model that's growing in the two minutes we have left here the movie i am what was for you the biggest learning from that movie and what is for you the biggest message you want people to carry with them when they walk out of the theater. well let me start with the message because i think it's the most important it's about the movie is really about how much power people have the movie asks a question i think we don't ask enough and that is who are you and by that i don't mean your social definition you know i'm tom shadyac i'm from this address in virginia but who are you really who are you when you look down through beneath the social story and when you find out who you are it's what the mystics always said you can't help but beam with passion and joy and so i want people to ask that

question and then wake up to their own power you know so often we give our power away to what we call our congressional leaders in washington i call them our congressional followers because when we have taken responsibility for our own power and we act on that power and we don't just exude love with a hug we exude it with an e-mail to to to move along something that we care about whether it's a homeless shelter that may come to your area or another issue that you're passionate about you have ultimate power and even that hug has power you know i'm a storyteller and if you look at a movie like back to the future you can see that one act if you go back in time twenty years if you give someone a kiss rather than a punch you change the whole future and if people understood that that what the what's faith really is is to believe that your own transformation the change that you talked about tom is actually making a difference so that's really what i want people to take away and that's what i learned i learned that even telling a little story like this we didn't make you know five hundred million dollars like

bruce almighty with this but i believe it has had and i have faith that it's having a very profound effect because it's it's calling people to question things and to shift their lives tom you're one of the one of the or the fine people on this earth thanks so much for being with us tonight. the more.

it will just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i didn't tell the truth. to. get a high.