Yeah

Right? And, and, and simply by changing the structure of, of a detective story, you're changing the whole identity of what those stories are, right? And so, um, for me, there's...

I always look at...

My first question is always, what am I taking for granted in approaching this story, right? And, and I'll give you an example.

I made a movie, Lucy in the Sky, with Natalie Portman, and I asked that question, and I thought, "Oh, well, this is a movie that's designed to play in a movie theater.

I'm taking the movie theater for granted, that it's a, that it, there's a big rectangle at the front and all these speakers, and you wanna use the whole rectangle, and you wanna use all the speakers.

But what if the movie theater itself could be a tool," right? What if when she's in space and everything's big, the image fills the whole screen and the whole room with sound? And then she comes back, and she's waiting in line to pick the kid up from school, and everything sort of shrinks down, and the sound moves to the front.

Right

Mm

... you know, my dad went through this sort of seven-year odyssey of heart issues and kidney and lung, you know, all this sort of stuff.

And then they were in New York, and then my m- mom got breast cancer and then, so then I was, there was a couple of weeks where I was in the city and I was, like, seeing him at his nursing home and then taking her to...

Columbia Presbyterian for her procedure, and I would go back to their apartment and I, and I would kind of vibrate, right? Because it's like-

Oh, wow

... which is Alan Arkin and Peter Falk.

And, you know, A- Alan's a dentist, and his son's getting married to this woman, and her father's actually in the CIA, Peter Falk.

And he, he's like, "Sheldon, I need you to come with me and do this thing." And they go on this, like, South American adventure.

Was it a difficult process to get the, the networks interested in your ideas? I mean, were they, were they, were they receptive right away based on your, your time there on Bones? Or was that kind of a tough, uh, transition into being a, a showrunner?

No, I mean, I, I had come from being a novelist, you know, to writing an original spec feature film, that I ended up selling, and my first novel had been optioned.

And they said, "All right, well, now you're a screenwriter, so give it a shot." So I did some feature writing, and then, you know, um, the TV agents at the agency were like, "Would you ever think about doing TV?" So I went out and I took some meetings, and I ended up selling a couple of TV pilots that I, that I wrote, and I thought, "Well, if any of these ever get produced, I should know how to make a show." And so whenever it was, 2004, I came...

I was in San Francisco, I came down to LA and I staffed on Bones, and I did it because Hart Hanson, who ran the show, said, "Well, you're gonna learn how to make a show."

Yeah.

And, and, um...

You know, whenever I come into a project, my first question is always, "What am I taking for granted?" Right? As a storyteller or filmmaker, whatever.

And with Lucy, I was like, "All right, well this is a movie that's gonna be shown in theaters.