Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I love being part of the community of movies. And I just want to be part of that, however it is. It was about six months later that I finally sold Ole Miss Sunshine. Wow. Wow. It's hard, right?
You think Gwyneth goes to Target? I don't think so.
I thought a lot about this because I feel like when you are a young person, what you're, one of the things you're choosing is you're choosing to enter a field and that field is going to represent your values, right? So if you want to be a Marine, you go off and join the Marines, right? And you go from being a civilian, you become a Marine, right? Or if you want to be a Buddhist monk, right?
You go off and join a monastery. That institutional monastery is going to change you into the sort of the ideal of Buddhism, like, or the ideal of being a Marine or the ideal of whatever, right? And so when I chose to be a screenwriter, it's not just that you're trying to get movies made and make money and be a success, you're also just joining a community.
And you're finding people who share your values, share your interests. I think that if I hadn't ended up being a screenwriter, I would have been a development executive, I would have been a producer, I would have been something else, maybe a, I don't know, work as an editor or something like that. I would have done something just because I love filmmaking so much.
Yeah, I feel like I've been very, very lucky. And I think you have to acknowledge that luck plays an enormous role in whether you're able to break through or not. So, I mean, I was very persistent. I worked for 10 years. I failed a lot, you know, 10 years of failure and disappointment. But I also felt like I was very...
deliberate in doing due diligence on all my screenplays and trying to figure out like, does this work or not? And, you know, I wrote a hundred drafts of Little Miss Sunshine, like trying to get it to a point where it was going to work massive and overwhelming force. Like there was no way you can say no to the screenplay. So it's a big risk.
You kind of jump off a cliff, but I also feel like I did it in a very methodical or kind of cautious way. I feel like no one's going to be helped by putting another mediocre screenplay out in the world. And you've got to be hard on yourself. You've got to be hard on your own material. You've got to let it be judged by other people. And you've got to accept their judgments, right?
Because if 9 out of 10 people don't like your screenplay, it's a pretty good bet that 9 out of 10 people are not going to like your movie.
You don't support me. I feel like screenwriting requires almost... a degree of masochism. It still doesn't work. It still doesn't work. Everyone goes, oh, it's great. It's fine. Send the script out. You go, no, no, you're all lying to me. Tell me what still doesn't work. You've got to really, really kick the tires on your story and you've got to be hard on yourself.
You're hard on yourself so it makes everyone else's job easier. It's going to make the actor's job easier, the director's job easier. The harder you are on yourself, the better your screenplay is, the easier everyone else's job is going to be. And so you've got to... Just kick the tires on your story. People can be peevish, like people can be assholes about your story, right?
But you've got to suck it up. Like those are the people who are going to be sitting in your audience. Billy Wilder had a great quote where he was talking about the audience and he said, individually, they're idiots, but collectively, they're a genius. And I think that you have to respect the genius of your audience, right? Your audience is smarter than you.
And so you have to be humble and you have to listen to the feedback you're getting. That's what Pixar really taught me was being at Pixar and the big feedback mechanism they have there.
Gotta keep taking it.
There's a certain point where you just recognize you're not going to make everybody happy. Well, that's for sure. Yeah. There's just a certain point where you're just like, fuck it. This is a script I want to see. Or I think this joke is funny. I don't care. I'm putting it in there. Like, I think it's funny. There's a certain point where you just have to, you can't please everybody.
If you try, you'd never make a movie, right? There's a certain moment of madness where you just have to jump off the cliff and go, okay, we're doing this. Or I'm sending the script out or whatever it is.
It was completely out of the blue. I had written the script for Little Miss Sunshine. It was being shot actually in the summer of 2005. So the movie hadn't been released yet. They hadn't even finished shooting it yet. And Pixar had gotten their hands on a copy of the script and they read it and they really liked it. And they brought me up and interviewed me.
And they were looking for someone to work with the director, Lee Unkrich, on an original idea that he had. And so I met with Lee at sort of three interviews. I made it over the bar kind of each time. And they hired me. And then that was right before the merger with Disney happened. So when the Disney merger happened, that was when they sort of asked Lee to take over Toy Story 3 and do it.
And my joke is that they all go into a meeting and they're like, okay, this is it. We're going to make Toy Story 3. And then at the end of the meeting, they're like, wait a minute, we need somebody to write it. Uh, you. Yeah. What is it you do again over here? Projects assistant, get over here. You're writing the script.
Target bags in hand.
Showing 1981–2000 of 2,071 · page 100 of 104
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