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 was like, I'm going to write a happy ending, but not just an ordinary happy ending. I'm going to write the happiest f***ing ending of all time. My goal was I'm going to drive the audience insane with happiness. And I think that what works about that is the one smart thing I'll say about Little Miss Sunshine is that you're creating a false binary.
at the end where Olive walks out on stage, you don't want her to lose the pageant, right? Because that would be horrible. But you also don't want her to win the pageant because that would be just cheesy, right? And you wouldn't really believe it.
And so one of the tricks at a climax is instead of having it be the good guys win or the bad guys win, which is just a sort of thing we've seen a gazillion times before and usually the good guys win, right? is to create a third option that nobody saw coming, like a third door that you didn't even know was there.
You open it up and like in Little Miss Sunshine, it was just having Olive come out and like she loses, like she rips her pants off and is disqualified. But that's something that you're misleading your audience to think that the only choices are two choices, winning or losing, right? And then you go, no, no, there's a third option, right? That's going to exceed the audience's expectation.
The other example is in Toy Story 3. Like we did a lot of work
to fool the audience at the end so that they thought that woody was still in the car in the college box he was going to college with andy and there's even a few shots pov shots from inside the box so that when andy opens up the box to give bonnie his toys and then finds woody at the bottom of the box it's a surprise not just andy but it surprised the audience right and so
I feel like humor is dependent on surprise. Like you got to catch your audience by surprise, but also emotion, like that sadness. I think that one of the reasons the end of Toy Story 3 is so emotional is because you don't expect Woody to be there. You're not expecting Andy to give him away. I feel like you can't be too clever about this stuff though.
Like I feel like you can't sit around and play a chess game with your audience and go, oh, I'm going to mislead them here and do X, Y, Z. But if you can, you just have to be aware of trying to create something new and surprising, you know, especially at the end of your story.
Well, it's, yeah, no, it's a balance that you have to walk. And you want to avoid defying expectations for the sake of defying expectations, right? You want to defy expectations in order to create emotion. That's the goal, right? You don't want your audience to be bored. You don't want your film to be trudging towards some sort of obvious conclusion.
So you want to keep things sort of up in the air and like, how is the hero going to get this thing to work? But yeah, audience expectations, I don't know. I just don't think about it too much. I'm going for emotion. I'm trying to like figure out like, what is the most emotional story I can tell?
You know what? This is something that I learned making this new video that I'm halfway through making about First Acts. I talk about two things, like how to get your audience on board with a character and then how to get your audience on board with that character's story. And when I sat down to think about what makes a great character and...
What is going to make a character memorable or a character last? This was something completely new that I just sort of figured out or thought of, which is a lot of times your character and the world they live in are two sides of the same coin. So the example I always go to is Robin Hood, for example. Like you start off in Robin Hood and King Richard is the king.
It's the fair, just universe, right? Robin Hood is actually just Robin of Locksley. He's his nobleman. He lives in his castle. Like everything is cool. It's only when King John usurps the throne takes over England, right? Starts this reign of abusive taxation, right? That the world tilts, like the world becomes unjust, right?
And now Robin of Locksley can either live in an unjust world or he can go screw it. Like I'm going to rebel against King John. I'm going to go into the woods. I'm going to gather a band of merry men. I'm going to rob the rich and give the poor. So the world itself, the world becoming unfair is the thing that creates the hero, right? The hero becomes the antidote to the negative values of the story.
And I think that when I started thinking about it a lot, I was just like, a lot of times what makes a hero very memorable is not the hero themselves. It's the world that they live in, right? And if you're describing the world and a problem in a world, that's something that makes it interesting. Jordan, this is a really good question.
And so the examples that I use are, well, for example, Thelma and Louise. Like in Thelma and Louise, those are two, like when you start the movie, they're just kind of two ordinary women. They're going on a weekend. They're going to have fun, right? Yeah. you create this huge doozy of an inciting incident, right?
Which is Thelma almost gets raped in the parking lot and Louise comes along and kills the guy, right? Oh, right. And then they realize that they're living in this misogynistic, sexist, hostile world, that no one's going to believe them. And they go on the lam.
I think what makes that story resonant and what makes them great characters was that nobody had seen two women in a Hollywood movie fighting back against sort of this universe of sexism and misogyny and male violence so defiantly, so sort of in your face, blowing up that trucker's rig and stuff like that.
And that was the thing that made the movie click with people is that sense of the character's defiance. Let me give one more example, which is I think that what made The Graduate such a resonant film for audiences back in the 60s was not really Ben Braddock. Ben Braddock's a nice guy, but he's a bit of a nebbish. He's not that interesting a character.
What no one had ever seen before was the world. Like we'd never seen Mike Nichols showing us this world of sort of post-war ennui and shallowness and materialism. And so you're creating this sort of tilted universe world of post-war America and the sense of alienation and the sense of conformity. And then Ben is the person who's swimming against that tide, fighting against it.
Showing 1921–1940 of 2,071 · page 97 of 104
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