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
That applies to working as a screenwriter in Hollywood as much as it does to like entrepreneurship or parenting or discovering your purpose, really anything in life. So How do you find the mountain?
That's an excellent question, actually. I think that when I think back on the films that I've written, usually there's a single moment in a story that was the inspiration for it. And I'll give you two examples. One was Little Miss Sunshine. And I was just looking for a good ending to the story.
And I wanted to write an ending that I made videos about, like an insanely great ending where it seems like the worst thing is about to happen and then the best possible thing happens. I spent six months just like trying to figure out what a good ending should be. And I was like, how can you engineer it? So everyone in the audience thinks the worst possible thing is going to happen.
And then in one second, you flip it over, the best possible thing happens. And I was thinking like, you know, should it be a sports movie? But that's kind of a cliche. Should it be like romantic comedy? It's hard to avoid cliches with that. I couldn't figure out. And then I was watching this little child beauty pageant on TV. And there were all these little skinny blonde girls.
And I just thought, God, wouldn't it be great If a little chubby girl got up there and you totally thought she would be humiliated, be the worst moment of her life. And then the music came on and she just rocked the house and just blew everybody away. I was like, that's a good ending. I know that's a good ending. So that was the beginning.
And then you go, like, if that's the ending, like, who is this little girl? What is this pageant? How did she get there? Who is her family, et cetera, et cetera. There's other scripts that I've written that have been based on the inciting incident of the story. I go, oh, that's a great beginning. I know where I can go with this because that's a great beginning.
Sometimes it's like a speech that a character gives and you go, oh, I want to hear a character give this speech. And then you're building the rest of the story out from it. So a lot of times you're finding the spark of inspiration just in a single moment. And then you just elaborate on that universe out from that single moment.
I feel like the low moment before your climax is actually the centrifugal center of your story. A lot of times what you're doing with your story is trying to drive your character down to the place where the worst possible thing is going to happen to them. And that becomes the focus of the rest of your story, right? You're just trying to go to the worst possible place.
I'll just grab off the top of my head. An example in Fellini's Eight and a Half, right? Like he's trying to figure out a story that he can make into a movie and he's failing and failing and failing. And finally, he goes to this press conference and they're like, what's your next movie going to be about?
And he just doesn't have an answer, you know, and people are mocking him and making fun of him and he crawls on the table and has this fantasy about shooting himself in the head. And then, God, it's such a great, that is such a great ending. That ending is so great.
But the first two acts of that story and half of the third act is just getting your character to this lowest possible moment where they feel exposed, humiliated. The worst thing is happening. And so, yeah. And then the Houdini trick for screenwriting is to be able to turn things around in a second. And Fellini does that really, really well.
But it's funny because you seem to be interested in a few common themes in all of your movies, but one of them is failure. Like Olive's family gets on the brink of disaster in a number of ways. Woody in Toy Story is constantly at risk of losing Andy. Are you particularly fascinated by failure? Is that a Michael Arndt thing? Or is that a theme that makes every story interesting?
Yeah, I think it makes every story interesting. I mean, you're looking for the worst, again, like knowing what the worst possible thing for your hero is. What is your hero desiring and wanting and the best possible thing, but what is also the worst possible thing for your hero? It's interesting.
I mean, this is something that I've thought of that's really new is that not only do you have a low moment in your third act or a lowest possible moment in your third act, what I call a moment of despair in your third act.
So it looks like at the end of your story, your character has failed, externally failed, internally failed, philosophically just failed in every possible way and then being able to flip it around.
The thing that I am talking about in this new video that I'm putting together about first acts is I think a lot of times it's really, really helpful to have a moment of despair in the first act of your story. And you see this over and over again in, well, just an example of Little Miss Sunshine is you build up all this emotional rooting interest. Olive wants to go do this beauty pageant, right?
And they've got to somehow get her
to california what you want to do is build up all this ahead of steam basically you want like audience emotional rooting interest they want to see this thing happen and then you shut the door so it seems like your hero is never going to get what they want right at the end of the first stack there's no way forward and then just cracking the door open so there's one possible way
for the character to get what they want creates this sort of maximum rooting interest, this huge audience momentum in the story. So it's interesting that you can have a moment of despair in the third half of your story, but having a moment of despair in the second half of your story, I think is really, really important too.
I mean, I grew up in New York going and seeing indie films and being really into David Lynch films and all that stuff. With screenplays, the stuff that I read, I think what I finally decided is that the thing that you're going for is the emotion at the end. How do you want the audience to feel when they walk out of the theater? And I made a very deliberate decision on Lola Sunshine.
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