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
His agency at CAA would be sending him scripts all the time. So I, and one of my jobs was just to read all the scripts that came in, write coverage on them, recommend whether you should read them or not. And so that was a great experience. Like that was really great. You see what's out there in the marketplace. You see what the agencies are sending out. You see what scripts work or not.
You see how actors are responding to a piece of material or not. So it was a very, very humble experience. position to begin with. We all have our humble beginnings. But it was great training because, again, it was really hard back in the 90s to just get access to screenplays. So it was a great job. And Matthew's a total sweetheart.
I had been with him when people go, hey, Ferris, is it your day off? You know, that kind of thing. He sort of resigned himself to that's going to happen once a week, once a week for the rest of his life.
Yeah, not really. I think I grew up. My dad worked in the Foreign Service. I grew up as a toddler in India. And then when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, we lived in Sri Lanka. Beyond that, we lived in suburban Virginia and no connection. Like the idea that you could make a living making movies was just it never even occurred to me that you could make do that for a living.
It just happens somewhere else. And my dad loved comedy. He would take us to go see Mel Brooks movies. He would take us to go see every new Woody Allen film together. And I think watching your dad laugh at something is always this very... It's just great when your dad just relax and laughs at something. But I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. It was really, I was in high school.
I was very unhappy, but I had always kind of loved films. I remember as soon as I found out there's this thing called film school, I was like, well, that's it. That's what I'm going to do. That created the ladder or at least the bottom rung of a ladder that I could put my hand on and start climbing. So as soon as I found out there's a thing as film school, I was like, that's what I want to do.
You know, it's funny that the thing that I really fell in love with with movies was I remember the moment it was when my whole family went and saw Apocalypse Now when it was first released. And I remember that opening scene where you do a triple exposure of like the jungle panning across the jungle, Martin Sheen's face upside down and the ceiling fan going and that music from the doors is playing.
And I was a kid. I was like 14, 15 years old. I'd never seen movies do something like that, you know? And it was so lyrical and so beautiful. I was like, oh my God, this is art. Like, this is art. I had been raised on multiplex fare, right? And when I saw that, and that whole movie just blew my mind. That's just like still one of my favorite movies. That's when I fell in love with movies.
And I really fell in love with the poetry of movies, the visual, the cinema of movies. And I think it's a little ironic that I... have ended up being this sort of story guy. Because when I started out, I kind of didn't care about story. I wanted, I love beautiful, the Black Stallion, like these lyrical art films.
But just like my first job out of film school was reading scripts and writing coverage on scripts. That's how your brain gets trained, I guess. How many scripts do you think you read in your career? About a thousand. I think about a thousand. I think I wrote about a thousand. Yeah. Wow. You know, most of them don't work.
I think that, I mean, it does get very soul crushing to read one screenplay after another. People have devoted six months a year of their life to writing this and it's just going to get read once and then get put on a shelf. And there's almost no field of human endeavor fraught with more disappointment and failure. than screenwriting.
And so, you know, when I started writing my own scripts, I was really determined that that wasn't going to happen to me. And I think that that's why I came up with this very rigorous sort of analytical approach to story. I mean, there's two sides of storytelling. You want to start, anytime you start writing, you're starting with the sort of intuitive, emotional side of your brain, right?
You're always connecting with something that's very very instinctive, right? But as you go through five drafts, 10 drafts, 15, 20 drafts of your story, you're going to make this transition from the quick thinking, fast, intuitive, emotional part of your brain to the sort of more analytical part of your brain.
So I think that, I mean, my training, reading a thousand scripts taught me, yes, you need great dialogue and you need great jokes and you need all the stuff that comes from your instincts, basically.
But I also feel like you can use the other part of your brain to sit down, put a story up on blocks, sort of x-ray it, you know, in formal terms and going, why is this script working or why is it not working?
Right, because you said it's much easier to get your script read. And I was surprised to read you an interview where you said it's much easier even to get your script made into a movie than it is to write a really good script. Oh my God. So 99% of your effort, you said, should go into writing... A good script. You wrote, what, 10 screenplays before you sold Little Miss Sunshine?
And my understanding is that from the time you seriously decided to be a writer till you sold your first screenplay, it was like a decade, right? It was like 10 years. What kept you going during that time? And why does it take so long to become a really good screenwriter?
So delusional optimism was the thing that sort of kept me going. I think that the one thing that kept me going was that I was told in film school that if you want to be a writer, if you want to break in, it's going to take 10 years. And of course, I thought, oh, I'm smarter than everyone. It'll only take me five years, you know, but it almost- Yeah, that sounds familiar.
And then also I got to enjoy the process of writing. Like I got to enjoy it. Like there is an exhilaration to come up with an idea going, oh, this is going to be really great. I will say that I had written 10 screenplays. Nothing had happened with any of them. None of them were especially great. Although I had written a little bit of Sunshine at that point, I just hadn't quite finished it.
And I was sitting down to write screenplay number 11. And I was in my 30s at this point. And I was just like, what am I doing with my life? Is there something else that I can do with my life? Because this isn't working out. And the one thing I'll pat myself on the back for is that I just kept going. I sat down. I thought about it. I was like, you know, I love movies.
Showing 1961–1980 of 2,071 · page 99 of 104
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