Patty Vest:
Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Â鶹´«Ã½. I'm Patty Vest.

Mark Wood:
I'm Mark Wood.

Patty Vest:
In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place.

Mark Wood:
This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today.

Patty Vest:
Today, we're talking with Aditya Sood, Â鶹´«Ã½, Class of 1997 and currently President at Lord Miller. As a producer, he's best known for box office hit movies, like the Martian, Deadpool 1 and 2, and Murder on the Orient Express.

Mark Wood:
So welcome, Aditya.

Aditya Sood:
Thank you so much for having me.

Mark Wood:
It's nice to have you with us here in cyberspace. I know this is probably a pretty challenging time in Hollywood the same way it is everywhere else. How are you adjusting personally and professionally?

Aditya Sood:
Well, it's interesting, the thing that they always said about Hollywood is it's never the same day twice. This year has certainly proven that, even though sometimes the days seemed like they run together. I think that's really fascinating was just how quickly long held traditions changed overnight and how the new traditions, some of which I think are going to last beyond the pandemic, reformed.

Aditya Sood:
Obviously, the two biggest challenges for us have been making movies and physically producing movies with crews of 100, 200 people often in distant locations, which if anyone has been on a film set, it's a very vibrant place where people are congregating and exchanging information. You need that kind of interactivity to make movies. Filmmaking is one of the most collaborative art forms, I think that there is. So, there's been a real learning curve for the whole industry over the last seven months now. Eight months? Boy.

Mark Wood:
Eight months, yeah, how time flies.

Aditya Sood:
What's really been interesting is now things are starting to go back into production. In fact, we have a television show that started shooting last week. We have a COVID testing protocol. It's become a lot more rigid, who can interact with whom.

Mark Wood:
Stuck in a bubble?

Aditya Sood:
Yeah, there are multiple bubbles, they can interact with each other. There's daily testing. It's going to have an impact. Obviously, it makes it harder to do things quickly. But at the same time, it also puts a little bit of pressure on everyone to maybe plan. I mean, people are generally very meticulous about filmmaking. It's an incredibly expensive process. So, you want to really make it count, but I think, the amount of attention and the logistics, because your ability to improvise on the fly is probably the thing that's the most curtailed by COVID.

Aditya Sood:
And then, of course, the other big piece of it has been how people consume movies, more so than television. I mean, television, obviously, people watch at home. We've seen the transformation of going from broadcast to cable and now to streaming services over the last 10 years. But for film, which traditionally, is a theatrical experience that that was also changing before COVID. It's obviously been a real sea change, hopefully, a temporary one, but I think they're going to be real permanent implications for how people go and see movies. Are people going to expect to see new release films at their home, because they've gotten the opportunity to do that over these last few months?

Aditya Sood:
Obviously, a company like Netflix, that's been their entire model. They in some ways were really ahead of this curve, but now the traditional studios are trying to figure that out. But it's not so simple, because the financial implications for this are profound. So, the kind of scale of movies that the studios are really focused on making don't necessarily lend themselves to be just streaming movies. So, you've seen the big movies that were supposed to go out this summer, there were a couple of them that may have come out on one of the streaming platforms, but for the most part, studios have actually just decided to sit on them and pay the interest on their investment and wait until there's a moment where they can actually release these movies in thousands of screens when it's safe to do so.

Aditya Sood:
So, it's precipitating a lot of conversations now about what movies should get made. Both in terms of there are some movies that are easier to make in this COVID environment. And then it does really have implications for what movies are going to be in movie theaters and what movies might not be in movie theaters. In some ways, there's opportunity there too, because there are types of movies that I think people have bemoaned haven't been getting made by major studios in the way that they used to 15, 20 years ago, when over the last decade, I would say, studios have really transitioned to these giant blockbuster tentpole movies.

Aditya Sood:
Sometimes, what people like to call the movies in the middle, financially, they don't make as much sense. But they may make sense on streaming, and some of them may make sense theatrical. I think the Martian is a movie that some could argue when we made it wasn't base... The book had just come out and was on the bestseller list, but it wasn't really based on something that had to totally pervaded the consciousness of the world. So, we were an original movie as much as we were based on Andy's brilliant book in the minds of the consumer. So, that's the type of thing that sometimes it's got a lot harder to make these days.

Aditya Sood:
We were very fortunate that we made a movie that I think really connected with an audience. It was able to perform at a level that justified being a big theatrical movie, but those movies come under a lot of pressure. So, you might see things that may not have been made 10 years ago or 5 years ago now starting to get made, but really being made for the streaming market in mind.

Mark Wood:
Do you think people will come back to the theaters when this is all over? I know that there's some people who seem to doubt that. Personally, I'm anxious to get back to a movie theater.

Aditya Sood:
Listen, I think there's going to be a lot of pent up demand once it's safe for big communal social experiences, whether that's going to a movie, going to a ballgame, going to Disneyland, going to a vacation. I think our brains have changed over these last few months. But when we're finally able to climb out of our boroughs and see our friends again, I think we're going to remember what that was like. So, I think there might actually be an over indexing of people out of the gate. I think there's going to be a real desire to do that. Where they're going to see that I think is interesting, that may change.

Aditya Sood:
I mean, obviously, my business is tangential to the theatrical exhibition business, but it does seem like the big movie chains have... They've certainly had a tremendously difficult economic period. There's some legal things that are happening. You may see some consolidation. You may see consolidation between studios and theater chains, which actually technically wasn't legal until I think this year since the '50s. It's going to change how people go see them. I think you're going to probably see fewer theaters, but you might see more spectacular theaters. You might see things where it really becomes an event.

Aditya Sood:
The model people talk about a lot is going to see a show on Broadway, where it becomes a real event. Maybe you're seeing it only for specific movies, but we'll see that. It's all pretty speculative, but I don't think the idea of big communal experience is going to go away anytime soon. Frankly, I think, part of the magic of movies and I love television as well, but one of the things that movies got to do that I think no other art form really does is you can take spaceships and dinosaurs and aliens obviously and put those on big screens, but it actually does an even more amazing thing I think with really intimate personal human drama, where you see conversations between two people on a 50-foot screen. It's actually a fundamentally different experience than seeing that in real life forcing it on a television-sized screen. So, I don't think it's going to go away. I really don't.

Aditya Sood:
I think what we have to do though is be really very specific and challenge ourselves to make movies that are worthy of people's attention. I think they have to be better than they've ever been. I think they have to be more interesting. I think they have to be more diverse. I think they have to really push the envelope, because the other thing that has also changed is the audience is just incredibly more savvy and story literate. They've just seen more things. They've seen all of the great movies. They've seen all of the great TV shows. When you make something new, you're actually being compared to hundreds and thousands of other stories, not just the movies that come out that weekend. So, to break through, you got to really be worthy of being the upper echelon of that, which is easier said than done, obviously.

Patty Vest:
Aditya, I want to take a little back. Tell us a little bit about your childhood, your experience with both of your parents are immigrant doctors. You've joked about your child. How was that experience? Did you know then that you wanted to do filmmaking or was that later?

Aditya Sood:
Actually myself, I was actually born in England and moved to the United States when I was, I think, about nine months old. So, we were an immigrant family and primarily grew up in Seattle, Washington. My parents are both, like you said, physicians, and themselves in a family of three of my four grandparents were physicians. Almost all of their brothers and sisters and cousins and I think we counted at our wedding, there was something like 63 doctors or something. We actually enumerated them by specialty. So, I don't know that I wanted to go into film necessarily.

Aditya Sood:
I can't tell you when I realized that, but I did know I didn't want to be a doctor. I think I was squeamish. I probably spent a lot of time waiting around in hospital while my parents were on call. I got my fill of strange sights and smells. I think technically, the first thing I ever wanted to do was to be a bus driver. I was really into bus schedules when I was a kid, but actually, my first love was astronomy. I want to be an astronaut, work for NASA for a really long time.

Aditya Sood:
And then I think the next big thing I really wanted to do, I loved coming down... We would come down to Los Angeles a few summers in a row, because my parents would have a conference or something. It was always at Disneyland, the Disneyland Hotel or the Convention Center in Anaheim. So, we would come down. So, I really fell in love with Disneyland and Disney World later when I was a kid. I think for a really long time what I wanted to do more than anything was design rides at Disneyland. I thought that would be the greatest job that anyone could ever have.

Aditya Sood:
And then interestingly and actually, when I was a teenager, there was a cover of Time Magazine with a picture of Mickey Mouse and Michael Eisner, who was the CEO of Disney at that time. It famously said, "Why is this my mouse smiling?" and was all about the transformation that had happened to Disney in the '80s and how they saved this company from ruin. I remember looking at that picture and seeing this guy and thinking like, "Wow, he runs Disney. I bet he's the guy who comes up with all the rides at Disneyland."

Aditya Sood:
I found out that wasn't true, but it was the first time I realized that there were people who were involved in actually making movies and making entertainment. I mean, obviously, you knew that on some level, but I grew up in Seattle. I didn't know anybody who did that. Somehow it started to morph.

Aditya Sood:
There was one winter, rarely snows in Seattle, but every other year, you get one real big storm. I remember we got snowed in and lived on this hill. So, it was really hard for us to get out. I'm an only child. So, it was the three of us. For some reason, we started to make a list of... It was some combination of movies my parents loved and then movies we wanted to see. It just became this long typewritten list. So, I was in high school at the time.

Aditya Sood:
What I ended up doing was actually systematically working through that list and seeing all of these movies, movies from the '50s, in the '60s, in the '70s, and things that I'd heard of but had never seen, like Chinatown or in fact, The Godfather. It was the first time I also realized, because I was paying attention to the credits, that you'd started to see the same names of people besides actors, but these writers and directors and producers show up time and again. It really made me aware. I mean, of course, I knew about George Lucas. I loved Star Wars when I was a kid.

Aditya Sood:
Here's one of the things about being an immigrant family, we were actually the first family on our block in the early '80s to have a VCR, because it was the only way for my parents to stay up on Bollywood movies, because Seattle had a really small Indian community at the time. In fact, what we used to do is... It was very funny. So, Seattle didn't really have a big Indian community, but we used to get in the car and drive up to Vancouver, British Columbia. There was a much bigger Indian community there, and we would drive. There's a little neighborhood, where they have all these Indian stores and restaurants.

Aditya Sood:
We would go into the store. The guy who on the store would turn the sign of the store from open to closed, and then we'd follow him. I guess, that's been his house, I don't know, downstairs. There'd be this sheet. On the sheet were 25, I didn't know at the time, but obviously, pirated Bollywood movies with photocopied covers. My parents would just stare at them and pick four, five, six movies. We would drive back to Seattle. Over the next couple months, they would watch those movies. And then they would drive back to Vancouver, return those movies, and then get six other movies. So, it was a-

Patty Vest:
The pirate Blockbuster.

Aditya Sood:
I can't imagine that was a good business model for anybody, but it really let my parents stay connected. One of the things that that happened was Star Wars, which I was just a shade too young to see I think when it came out in theaters. I think Return of the Jedi was coming out. So, my dad went to the library actually and got the VHS copy of Star Wars. I saw that and my head exploded. It was like, I never seen anything like that.

Aditya Sood:
My dad's a clever fellow. By the way, I think the statute of limitations is passed, so I can tell this, but he ended up actually getting a friend's VCR as well. He made a copy of Star Wars. I watched that movie... I mean, now it's common. My five year old watches the same movies all the time. In that time, in 1993, I actually ended up watching Star Wars once or twice a day probably for an entire summer. So, I mean, I saw that maybe 75 times or more or at least parts of it.

Aditya Sood:
Obviously, I love the story, but it was also really interesting to me that... I don't think I even could articulate at the time, but there were patterns in the storytelling that were really interesting as well. One of the things that was also happening was we were studying Greek and Roman mythology in school. In fact, my parents were teaching me about Indian mythology at the same time.

Aditya Sood:
I think that Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth stuff was also really popular right around that time, because of the connections with Star Wars. It was the first time I realized that "Boy, these stories are all similar and different in these keyways." That was really interesting to me. There was like a math to it. I also loved math too. So, I just got really interested in stories and how stories work. So, I think all of these things culminated.

Aditya Sood:
When I was in high school, I decided one day, I think I told my parents like, "Yeah, I think I want to go to Los Angeles and work in the film business." I don't know that I got the same reaction that probably most immigrant children get, which is that my parents are actually real follow-your-bliss kind of people. They, I think, had seen how dedicated I was to being methodical about learning about film, teaching myself about it. They said, "Okay, well, you should do that. You should do it." I mean, then, of course, they said, "I mean, you should have a backup, right?" So, they definitely encouraged me to... I don't even know if they knew the difference between a business degree and economics degree. You should just get a back-up degree. I said, "Okay."

Aditya Sood:
I thought what I would do, because there was one biography of George Lucas that was in our school library and I looked at it and it said, "USC Film School." So, I thought, "Oh, well, I guess that's what you have to do. You have to go to film school if you want to go work in the film business. It makes sense." So, I applied to USC and UCLA, because those seem like the two grade film programs. Ironically, I actually didn't apply to the film programs. I thought I would just apply to the schools and then go there. And then just take some film classes and not realizing that wasn't how it worked at all.

Aditya Sood:
But I had a college counselor in high school I think was really amused with my interests. Everyone always said, "You're so good at math and science. Why don't you go be an engineer?" I said, "I don't know. I like those as a hobby, but I'm really actually interested in this other thing." He said, "Listen, you should apply to Pomona." I said, "Pomona, that's good. They don't have a film program. They're not really in Los Angeles. It's a small school. I've never seen them play football on a Saturday. Why would I go to Pomona?" He's like, "Just trust me, just apply." So, I applied.

Aditya Sood:
I shouldn't say this, but partially because it was the early days of the Common App. I realized if I could apply through the Common App, instead of the Pomona App, I could write one less essay. I could reuse one of my other essays, so don't tell my parents. So, I applied. I got in.

Mark Wood:
We won't tell anybody.

Aditya Sood:
Yeah, please. They can still rescind it, I think. I was very fortunate. I got in. I actually got in before I ever visited campus. I'd come down to visit USC and UCLA and Pomona. I remember taking a tour at USC and you look around. You're like the George Lucas shooting stage and the Steven Spielberg scoring stage and Johnny Carson television stage. You're just like, "Okay, well, it felt like you're on a movie lot." And then you go to UCLA. It's just like absolutely gorgeous, just the most beautiful green lush. Yeah, it must have been in April. And then a very funny thing happened. I took the tour at UCLA. There's one very nice person gave me this tour. I remember walking around and just everything looks so beautiful.

Aditya Sood:
I remember halfway through the tour, he like waved at somebody that he knew. He said, "Yeah, we were in a class a couple years ago." I said, "Oh, it's such a friendly campus." Afterwards, I ended up talking with him and he said, "Well, where else are you applying?" I said, "Well, to be honest, I'm deciding between here and USC and Pomona." As soon as I said it, he looked around, I swear to God, he checked both directions. He said, "They would kill me if I told you this, but you should go to Pomona." I said, "Wait, you just gave me the UCLA tour. What are you talking about?" He's like, "It's great here, but to be honest, it takes forever for me to get my classes. I got into Pomona. I've always thought I might have made a mistake." I couldn't believe it.

Aditya Sood:
So, the next day, I was actually taking the tour Pomona and I went. It's funny, because I never remembered who these two women were, but they were probably freshmen. So, they were probably a year older than me in school, but they were the nicest two people I ever met in my life. They couldn't walk 10 feet without running into someone that they knew. All of a sudden, I realized what it meant to be at a small liberal arts school. My parents didn't know. They didn't grow up in this country. There wasn't a tradition of that. They both went to medical school, straight out of high school, actually. It's a totally different system.

Aditya Sood:
I just remember thinking at that time, I don't know why, but I said, "All right. I love this. This really feels like the place for me. They don't have a film program. I'm going to figure out some way to swim upstream and get into Hollywood, but I'm going to take four years. I'm going to learn something to make movies about." That's what I did. I entered as an economics major. It made my parents were happy, but honestly, I just took random classes for a couple of years. I didn't really think about what my major was going to be.

Aditya Sood:
When I was a sophomore, I convinced my parents to bring a car down to Pomona. This is a little bit of a nerdy aside, but it was the early days of the internet. I actually made a friend on the internet, who was roughly my age and was going to school in Washington, D.C. We both realized we're similar. We love movies. He actually said, "Well, I just did this internship at New Line Cinema," which at that time was a small, independent movie studio. He said, "You should do that. Call them and why don't you go for an interview?" I remember thinking, "Oh, my God. This is it. How could I possibly get this job? I'm sure there are a million people lining up to do this."

Aditya Sood:
So, I drove into... This is pre Google Maps. I really looked at the Thomas Guide and figured out which exit to take. It all seem very far away. It was about 45 minutes away or an hour. I went in. The other thing that I'd also done running up to this was there were two newspapers basically, that would cover all of the film business. There was something called The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. They're both around today now. They're a couple others. They're not really published anymore, but they used to be physical magazines.

Aditya Sood:
I discovered them by accident and when I was in high school. Initially, I didn't realize they were like industry trade papers. I just thought they were like film fan magazines, because like all they did, were talk about all of these movies that I never heard of before. Because anytime someone would sell a script or they started shooting a movie or something, they would announce it in these publications.

Aditya Sood:
So, I started just reading them religiously. In fact, the very first person I ever met that worked in the film business was... I was sitting in Honnold Library, where they actually had Variety. I was just sitting there reading it. All of a sudden, this person comes up to me and looks at me and says, "Hey, how long have they had back here?" I slipped up. I said, "Ever since I've been a student." He said, "Oh, that's great. When I was a student here, I used to write letters to the library telling that they needed to subscribe." I said, "Oh, that's really interesting." And then he just said, "Do you want to get a lunch? Do you want to go In-N-Out and get a burger or something?" I remember thinking, "This is very strange thing, but okay, why not?" Well, I mean, something really terrible could happen. So, we went.

Aditya Sood:
His name was Greg McKnight. He was a Pomona student a few years before me. He graduated and come back to campus. He had just graduated from the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC and was going to work at one of the agencies at William Morris, which was the oldest agency in Hollywood. We really just struck up this friendship. We've been pals turns out for 25 years. We did a big project over the summer that was based on a piece of material and a writer that he represented. But going back years, we've been friends and he's helped me get jobs and always had good advice. It all started out of this random conversation, just a serendipitous conversation at Honnold.

Aditya Sood:
Anyway, all this to say, by the time I got to New Line, I had been reading and soaking up this information about the industry for a couple of years. So, I think they were really tickled that there was an intern, who could make photocopies, but then when they would ask, "What are the romantic comedies that are in development at Warner Brothers?", I would rattle off a list of names. They're like, "But how do you know that?" For whatever reason, I've had a pretty good memory in my life. So, yeah. So that my was my start in the business. I ended up working there for my sophomore and junior year.

Aditya Sood:
And then my senior year, I went over to DreamWorks, which was at that time, this brand new studio that had been just started about a year before by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been in that Disney article all those years before, I couldn't believe that I could be working so close to these two guys, David Geffen who obviously was a legend. I worked there for a year and I graduated. And then that really is what started my career. I then went on to work for a producer named Mark Johnson, and then went over to Warner Brothers a couple years after I graduated as a Junior Executive there. I stayed for a number of years and left. I went back to DreamWorks and ran a production company that was based at DreamWorks.

Aditya Sood:
And then the one thing that happened to me, I've been doing since I was 18. I was about 31 or so. I realized that I needed a break. It'd been great, but I was getting a little bit burnt out. My other love had always been politics. I came back to economics. I ended up being a PPE major, mostly because I've taken so many random classes at Pomona that it was the only major that most of them fit into. I didn't realize everyone else was going to go be a lawyer. I just thought it was just an interesting collection of subjects.

Aditya Sood:
So, I actually went and did a lot of organizing for the Obama campaign in 2008 and just had an amazing time. I was so excited about him as a candidate and being involved in politics. It's ironic that we're having this conversation and they're probably minutes away from calling the presidential race tonight. So, this is an exciting moment. So, I went and did that. And then took a year after that, I flirted with the idea of doing it permanently as a career change. In fact, I talked to the Kamala Harris's campaign when she was running for attorney general in California and super impressive. I was so taken with what she was all about, but I realized I still had this itch to do more things in Hollywood. I just wanted to do a little bit differently than I had done it before.

Aditya Sood:
So, I took a year and traveled the road, tried to figure out what it was exactly that I wanted to do. It just at that moment, it was fortunate that a really talented writer named Simon Kinberg, who was looking to become a producer... We had a lot of mutual friends. We ended up working together for nine years at Fox and made a bunch of movies together. He was making a lot of the X-Men movies. And then I was really left to build a whole slate of movies, again, movies that I just thought were really interesting and hopefully really commercial.

Aditya Sood:
So, that's where the Martian and Murder on the Orient Express came from. I was able to merge my love of astronomy with movies in the Martian and then my love of politics with a television show in Designated Survivor, which was a TV series that we had developed and then produced. Now I get to work the Deadpool movies as well, which was a real blast.

Mark Wood:
Let me get you to drill in a little bit more about the Martian. That's one of my favorite movies, reveal and one of my favorite books too. Can you tell us how that all happened?

Aditya Sood:
So, it's a pretty amazing story really from Andy Weir's point of view. Andy was a computer programmer in Silicon Valley, who always wanted to be a writer. I think he had tried to write a novel. He had quit his job and tried to write a novel. He tells me, it went nowhere. He realized that he was just never going to do it professionally, but he loved writing. So, he started writing short stories and putting them on the web. I think one of them ended up on the front page of Reddit. So, he started getting this small, little, very loyal band of readers. And then you have the idea for something longer in the Martian.

Aditya Sood:
So, he would write chapters online and actually would get that fact checked by these very dedicated... He's brilliant. He works out all of the math and science actually before he writes his stories, but these guys knew what they were doing as well. So, he wrote this over a couple of years, chapter by chapter. When I came across it, it was still a self-published book. He had basically put it up on his website. And then someone wanted to read on his Kindle, so he put it on the Amazon Kindle site and very sheepishly said he had to charge 99¢, because they wouldn't let you do anything for free. It was amazing, 10, 000, 15,000 people probably downloaded the book. It has incredible reviews.

Aditya Sood:
When I read it, I could tell within a page that this was a science fiction story that was both written by somebody who knew the science and astronomy better than I knew, but I knew it was authentic. But also, it was just really funny in this totally unexpected tone for science fiction and incredibly human. That combination was so potent. When I read the book, I read it overnight. I called my friend, ironically, the same friend who I had met on the internet, who had gotten me my job at New Line. Years later, I had called an executive at Fox and said, "Hey, you should really interview my friend, Steve, to be a Junior Executive at your company." He ended up getting a job. And then 12 years after that, I found him as the Executive on our deal when I was producing there.

Aditya Sood:
So, I told him, I said, "You have to buy this book. You have to buy it really quickly before anybody else reads it, because it's going to cost 50 times as much if we don't jump on this quickly." So, to Fox's credit, they jumped on it. I had one writer in mind when I read the script, a writer named Drew Goddard, who I'd worked with a number of years before, but I could just hear his voice when I read Andy's book. I gave it to Drew and said, "Listen, you trust me. I know you say no to everything, but just read this. You got to do this movie." He said, "Wait, okay, let me get this straight. The self-published book, you want me to adapt a blog basically?" I said, "Well, if you put it like that." I said, "Just trust me."

Aditya Sood:
I still have the five emails he sent me that weekend, saying, "All right, I'm a quarter of the way through. This is pretty good. Please tell me it stays that way." "I'm halfway through. All right, there's something here." And then basically, "I'm in tears." And then, "We got to do this. Can we talk on Monday?" So, it was a really amazing process. It never works out this way, but I gave the book to one writer. He said yes. He wrote one draft of the script. It was just about perfect. He was initially going to direct it and then couldn't direct it. People heard about the script. All of these directors started chasing it. We get to one actor. We get to Matt Damon. He said yes.

Aditya Sood:
And then, all of a sudden, Ridley Scott was available, because he had another movie that was supposed to go, and it fell apart on a Friday. We sent him the script on a Saturday. By Monday, I think we were in his office meeting about it. We were in production six months after that. I mean, it was so fast.

Aditya Sood:
I remember there was a project at Warner Brothers when I was a Junior Executive there that had been in development already for 20 years. That was 20 years ago, and it's still in development. So, these things can sometimes last a really long time, but that one, there's something magical about it. Everybody who we would send it to would just keep saying yes, whether it was director, actors. It really was an incredible experience. To me, the really, really important thing was, "How could we protect the integrity of the science that Andy had written into the book?", which in some ways-

Mark Wood:
It's rare to see a science fiction movie that gets the science right. That's one of the things I love about that.

Aditya Sood:
Listen, Andy has a superpower in that he can make really complicated science ideas really understandable. Drew has a superpower of knowing which of those would translate the screen and how to tell those visually. Ridley, of course, has this incredible superpower of just realizing that. So, just the combination of those three genius brains, and of course, Matt, and all of those actors, I think we were able to just protect the core.

Aditya Sood:
One of the things about that movie, and I think, one of my favorite things to see in movies are experts. When you see somebody, who is just better than you at doing anything, when you watch their process and what they're doing, you feel like you are in good hands and you're learning as you're seeing it. I think it's the secret to Aaron Sorkin. He's so good at writing experts. So, whether it's Moneyball or A Few Good Men or Social Network, you're just so in that world and it feels authentic.

Aditya Sood:
Also, the thing about it was there was a real, I like to call it, smart optimism about the story, about the book and about the movie. Where interestingly, there is no antagonist in the movie, but it's very dramatic. There are people who are all trying to solve a problem. They're constrained by circumstance. They're constrained by nature and then they have different ideas on how to solve a problem. I think one of the most dangerous tropes in science fiction is the mad scientist. It's a great trope. It's really effective. It's been great since Frankenstein, probably before, every Michael Crichton book. I love those stories of mad scientists, but there's something pernicious about it, also, especially in a world that is unfortunately, a significant part of the public is anti-science, either doesn't respect it or it's fearful of it or disdains it.

Aditya Sood:
This was a movie that really celebrated science. It really celebrated NASA. It really, I think, was about the best in humanity, but it did in a way that I think wasn't saccharin. I think there is a really cloying version of that story that hopefully, we succeeded, but we really endeavored to avoid doing. So, it was just a wonderful experience. You pray that you get one of those in your lifetime. I was really fortunate to have it and hopefully have it again. I'm working with Andy on a bunch of other projects now. In fact, his next two books...

Aditya Sood:
I left that company. A year ago, I teamed up with my friends, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who are directors and writers and just brilliant, brilliant artists. They share these very same values about doing things. They do stories that are optimistic but not saccharin. They really celebrate, I think, overlooked heroes and people who use creativity to solve problems. I think those are all really wonderful components of a lot of great stories.

Aditya Sood:
So, we did this together, so that we could endeavor to try and make more of those and make those movies that you may not know that you ever wanted to see a movie, a Lego Movie or a movie about a guy stuck on Mars or a retelling of a 75 year old Agatha Christie book, but I think if you can do it in a way that respects the integrity of the material, that understands hopefully why things are successful in the form that they exist in initially but reinterpret them for the screen, I think that can be really potent combination.

Aditya Sood:
So, we're doing a couple of projects with Andy, his next two books, one that's been published called Artemis and his next book that comes out in May called Project Hail Mary. We're developing both of those for Chris and Phil to direct. And then we actually have an original idea that he came up with that isn't the book. That might be a book at some point, but it's a really cool, very different than the Martian. But again, another story that really does celebrate human ingenuity and plucky and, "How do you, in the most trying of circumstances, really find community?"

Aditya Sood:
By the way, a topic that could not be more germane to the situation that we're in right now. I said to Andy when we went on lockdown, because I was driving I think for the first time when we all went home, I remember just getting everything ready. This was before masks, right? I had my hand sanitizer and water and gloves and everything. I called him and I said, "Andy, I felt like Mark Watney going in the Mars rover on a mission." I said, "Did you ever think that we would be running a massively parallel simulation of the Martian with seven billion people where we're all trapped on this planet by ourselves?" He said, "I know, it's a little eerie."

Patty Vest:
And then there's Deadpool, which seems to have started a trend of off-beat superhero movies. How did that come about?

Aditya Sood:
Well, that was an interesting one. That was a movie that Ryan Reynolds and these two brilliant writers, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, and a brilliant director Tim Miller had had been developing actually for a number of years before we got involved. So, to be really honest, we came in to try to get them over the finish line. They've been trying to get the movie made for a number of years.

Aditya Sood:
I think all of a sudden, we realized and the studio's really realized that you could do superhero movies that didn't have to all feel like just a giant, again, summer blockbuster, one-size-fits-all movies. This is something that was written to be R rated and had a real specific attitude and comedic point of view. The studio basically said, "All right, look, you're going to make it for a quarter of what we normally make these superhero movies for, but we're going to let you really go for it." So, that was a real fun one. I feel fortunate to have been a part of it and hopefully contributed I think what I could.

Aditya Sood:
To see Ryan and everyone really just realized that was really exciting. And then the sequel, all of a sudden, you were in an interesting place, because you're no longer the underdog. All of a sudden, that first movie, when you made it, it was a scrappy little thing. And then it exploded in such a way. I think the challenge with sequels always is they'd spent seven years on that story and the script on the first one. The second one, you didn't have as much time. You never have as much time on the second one. Everyone wants you to play the hits, but they also want something new.

Patty Vest:
Of course.

Aditya Sood:
You got to figure out, "What's the right mix? What's the tone?" I think we learned a lot from the first movie. I think we also knew we had to evolve. So, I think the second one got much bigger. I think we were able to add a really fun group of actors and different personalities. Ryan, really, as long as he is the North Star of that franchise, it's always going to work. So, I feel foolish to even say, but I think you do want to make sure that... You never know if lightning strikes twice.

Aditya Sood:
I remember reading about I think by the time they made the third Indiana Jones movie, Steven Spielberg used to call the Indiana Jones theme the thrill button. You can't press it that many times. Actually, the third Indiana Jones, they barely played the Indiana Jones theme. When it finally comes in, at the end, it's so rousing, because you've been anticipating it the whole time.

Aditya Sood:
I think, with a sequel, you got to be really careful. Listen, I was really happy with how that turned out. I think, in some ways, the first movie is a much darker movie and has probably more pathos, which I think was really critical to establishing who Deadpool was. The second movie, I think, is just a romp. It's fun and hopefully not obnoxious. I think it really sings. Those movies are a delight.

Mark Wood:
We're almost out of time, but I've got to ask. I was reading something about you growing up with fellow filmmaker, Chris Miller, who you work with today. I just imagined the two of you those kids from Spielberg's movie Super 8, running around making a zombie movie with your dad's camera. Was that what it was like?

Aditya Sood:
Well, we did. We did a couple of things. The first one, the magnum opus was a movie called The Adventures of Jungle Steve. Initially, it was a little bit more ambitious. It was a meta movie called How To Make A Movie On No Budget. It was about a producer who was basically trying to do an Indiana Jones, Star Wars knockoff. It all stemmed from me basically wanting to do the gag of having someone dressed as Indiana Jones with a garage door slowly coming down on top of them and having them roll through and grab their hat. And then from there, we got ambitious. We did all sorts of crazy things. In fact, one of my other friends, his aunt had an Amphicar, which was a car that could actually drive and then become a boat when you would go into a lake.

Mark Wood:
It's something from a James Bond movie though.

Aditya Sood:
Well, what's really funny about it, so the whole movie was just a send up of all these Spielberg moments. And then we had this great set piece. By the way, he was the only one who was allowed to drive it. So, it was a really awkward thing, where we had to explain why our heroes weren't driving, and this other stranger was. We had a whole action set piece out on Lake Washington and then didn't sink the car, which was I think appreciated. But the funny postscript to that was we did it, and then 15 years later, Spielberg actually made a fourth Indiana Jones movie. You wouldn't believe it, there's an Amphicar sequence in that movie.

Patty Vest:
[crosstalk 00:50:52] from you, guys.

Mark Wood:
[crosstalk 00:50:53] time.

Patty Vest:
He got the idea from you, guys.

Aditya Sood:
Yeah, I don't want to say that. That's not what I want to say.

Mark Wood:
So, I wish we could keep talking, but on that note, we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking with noted film producer Aditya Sood, Class of 1997. It's been fun to have you with us.

Aditya Sood:
Thank you so much for having me.

Patty Vest:
Thank you. To all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Â鶹´«Ã½. Stay safe, and until next time.