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Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of the Future of StoryTelling, and I'd like to welcome you back to the FoST podcast. On today's episode, I have the great honor of speaking with legendary production designer and world building pioneer, Alex McDowell. You may be familiar with Alex's groundbreaking production design work for such films as Fight Club, Minority Report, and Watchmen, and we'll explore the history behind some of those projects in today's conversation, but what makes Alex especially vital and important as a storyteller is his keen ability to conceptualize, articulate and act upon the connections between fictional storytelling and real world progress.

When Alex discusses world building, he's often talking not only about imagining fictional worlds, but also about using the principles of world building to imagine better futures for our own. His belief in the practical applications of world building are evident in the work of his studio, Experimental Design, and in his role as a professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where he teaches and directs the USC's World Building Media Lab and World Building Institute, both of which are founded on the belief that storytelling is the most important and powerful system for the advancement of human capabilities. Alex is a perfect embodiment of the idea that better stories can lead to a better future, and I am honored to welcome him to the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Charlie Melcher:

Alex McDowell, I am so honored and delighted to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast.

Alex McDowell:

Delighted to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

We have had so many nice conversations over the years, and it dawned on me, I never asked you anything about your childhood. And I thought about it, you know, children have such amazing imaginations that they can pick up a paper towel roll and think they're wielding Excalibur. They create these fantasy worlds that they play in. What worlds did you create as a child, and did you get to play in?

Alex McDowell:

It's a great question because I think that's as much as possible where we try and stay, actually. In that child brain. World building is being in a sandbox. You have some total control. So yeah, my childhood, I lived in Sumatra in Indonesia till I was seven. We were living in a little colonial village, as a Shell builds its own villages and its own golf course in the middle of the village, and it's sort of in place. Across the road was a jungle, and in the jungle was a swimming pool, an abandoned swimming pool, and lots of stuff that had been taken over by the jungle. And I feel like that actually is the driver for me, is working through the jungle and finding these moments of revelation. This is getting a little metaphoric.

But the other thing that was very influential is I went to boarding school after that. So I was in a single sex boarding school from 7 to 18. That puts you in a bubble where your imagination is your self defense a lot of the time, and you don't have family and you don't have that support system, and so you put it all in here. So I think that kind of combination of curiosity and somewhat self-defense is where I am.

Charlie Melcher:

And then your early career was involved with the punk rock scene and in the UK. Tell us a little bit about that.

Alex McDowell:

Yeah, I was at art school. So my entire schooling from around the age of 10, I pretty much zeroed in on being an artist. It was probably a way of copping out of doing math, and I was accepted to a school called Central School of Art. A sort of old, dusty art school in the center of London. And part of our classes was doing screen printing. And part of my job was being social secretary, which meant that I booked the bands in my second year. And this confluence of things came together because somebody came off the street and said, "Do you want a band to play for free tomorrow night mate?" And I went, "Absolutely." Free band. And it was the Sex Pistols first gig.

And so that completely changed everything like overnight, seeing that energy. They were already the fully formed kernel of what punk became. And we were into rock and roll, and the next day we were into punk. And then so I started working with them, printing tee-shirts with Vivian Westwood, doing a lot of design really, starting to move into record sleeve design. There was enormous distrust from the record companies of these anarchic young bands who didn't give a shit about the record companies. And to some extent, we, those who were working for the bands and delivering to the record company, became mediators.

And so a lot of my work at that time was kind of weaving through the delicate translation between the purity of the punk music and the people making it, and not in any way betraying or undermining that, and at the same time knowing that one had to work with the man to properly frame what punk was going out into the world as.

Charlie Melcher:

It always seemed like the Sex Pistols were about breaking down a world, right? They were recreating the world of music in their own image, and so I guess your early job had to do with mediating between two very different worlds.

Alex McDowell:

Yeah, yeah. And it's true. They were breaking it down and rebuilding it. Partly because we were all reacting to Thatcher Britain, you know, to a disastrous social system. We were reinventing a world which involved the music, the squatting, the drugs, all of the aspects of that, but it was very self-contained. More and more people came into it, and there was a central identity. And so the anarchy there was essentially remaining fluid. And I think that's also been very, very persistent in my practice is that things evolve all the time. And you do know that you can break things down to ground zero and you can start again.

Charlie Melcher:

Okay. So let's jump forward. So from T-shirts and record album covers, you started to do music videos, and that led you into moving to Hollywood, to LA, and being involved in the film industry.

Alex McDowell:

So I started essentially day one working on a music video for Iggy Pop as a production designer. I didn't know what it was, but I was in that role of being the only person driving the design. And that became more and more official. My job then was to design music videos, working with a big production company called Propaganda, which was probably the central successful production company. David Fincher was at the center, and I was working with him constantly, seven days a week for probably a year. So that was formative.

My first film was Lawnmower Man, which came a little out of left field. An academic in Silicon Valley was deeply involved in VR, ran into a Stephen King book, and put the two together. And so it was the very first representation of VR on film, which was interesting since, you know, without me having any idea that I was going to end up inside a VR helmet for a good chunk of my time.

Charlie Melcher:

A foreshadowing, we'd call that.

Alex McDowell:

Suppose so, yeah. It was amazing to actually be in the first headsets, one of the first headsets, which is probably a $10,000 thing that you put on your head and had haptics, and the graphics were absolutely primitive. Like a 2D palm tree and a yellow beach and a blue sea. And so you were moving through space and you had control. Do I want to go up and down? And then you get to this palm tree and you reach out to this cartoon palm tree and you can feel it. And that was an unbelievable experience.

Charlie Melcher:

Mindblowing.

Alex McDowell:

Mindblowing, yeah. And then Fight Club. And Fight Club was the launch. David Fincher invited me to do that. And that was the pivot, because it was filmmaking to the highest degree. David's unbelievably demanding. He knows your job better than you do, and everybody on the crew's job better than they do. And so you have a standard to reach and you have to invent a new practice to be able to deal with the complexity of it.

In every way, a production designer's job is world building. We follow a linear path of a script, but we have no idea which way the camera's going to point. Nevertheless, I think the production design, and I only really realized this after I left the industry, is an absolutely unique craft. As a narrative designer, you're considering really five dimensions all of the time. You're considering time and space, you're considering story, and all of those things are constantly weaving around each other. Examining and determining and executing a world that is spherical. And then the camera man, the cinematographer, and the director put the actors where they want, and shoot. And at that moment, it's locked into a linear time-based medium.

Charlie Melcher:

So before we get to what you're doing today, let's talk about Minority Report and the challenge that Steven Spielberg gave to you when he hired you to work on that.

Alex McDowell:

We were challenged to build a world before the script existed, and the constraint, which was also massively influential, was that it should be future reality, not science fiction. And so Steven enabled us to go out into the world and do the kind of research that becomes the driving force of the worlds we build now, which is researchers, the foundation. And you build from that research and you extrapolate forward and the world evolves from the clues you get, from the research you do. So with Minority Report, we went into MIT Media Lab, and we were shown exciting object after exciting object that represented amazing transformational innovation. And we got to tap into that and then convert it and put it into the future.

Charlie Melcher:

And so that began a practice of world building. I guess my first question is, can you describe, in some relatively succinct way, what the practice of world building is as you've developed it?

Alex McDowell:

I think at its simplest terms, or might think of it like this. So if you were coming out of your front door and heading west on 13th Street, and you were walking towards the river, and you went through Jackson Square and you moved your way towards the Highline, you would be an observer constantly. This is an area that somebody like yourself might know very well.

Now to turn that into the world, the provocation for us might be, what is that part of New York going to look like in 20 years? One of the things that happens is that we have to consider what may disrupt the world. So you could have been doing that journey four or five months ago, walking down a crowded street, little do we know that in a few short weeks, you can't walk down that street. You've got to put on a mask, you can't leave home, nobody's in the street. Everything changes. That's substantially part of world building. Now everybody in the world knows that disruption is possible.

There's always this arc of, the present is this floating point in space and time, history is a constant. So we're always tapping into the idea that that person in the street is a sixth generation immigrant, and there's an entire history associated with them. All of that history is set in time, even though there's lots of choices made about which history to choose from, but our job is to move from this point forward and imagine all of the possibilities. So that arc is relatively linear to now, but it diverges completely from this point forward, because we really don't know when disruption is going to hit, and we really don't know all of the influences, and we don't know what global warming is going to do, which is a big part of the work we're being asked to do, is: what's the effect of that?

Charlie Melcher:

And what's the biggest value of doing these exercises?

Alex McDowell:

With a lot of the work we do, the value is creating change in the present. How do we shift what we're doing to get to the future we would like? Or, how do we provoke the people that we represent to think differently about their future so they are engaged in changing it?

To talk about the other kinds of plans, we're working with an indigenous tribe in Alaska, in Anchorage, whose focus is on tapping into the 10,000 years of history, and a very deep knowledge of innovation and culture and all of the things that are connected to that past, but a desperate need to pivot into the future. How do they move forward with all of this change and crazy disruption going on? And this is a primary area of interest for us, is so how do you give the opportunity, empower the youth, to tap in, to reconnect to their past and become innovators of their own future? To own their own future?

And in the process of doing that, we've seen this very interesting shift where in the past, the youth would listen to the elders, and the stories would be passed down through generations, holding onto culture, holding onto survival, tradition. But it would be this hierarchical passing down of knowledge. Now, what is ahead is as unknown as it used to be in the very early days of survival. You've got this massive shift going on. And the people who really are tapped into that, who can use it, who are augmented by it and are changing it are the youth. And so in this case, it's how do you innovate your own community, and how does that innovation become holistic and start pushing out into the world? And suddenly you as a non-Westerner are having a massive influence on Western society.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the things that's so exciting about the work that you do is it has storytelling at the core of it to help create systems or tools that can solve the world's great problems. It's this way of getting us to think longer-term, and I guess, ultimately, to feel empowered, to have some control over that, in a world where I think many people feel just the opposite. They feel hopeless or out of control. How actively do you promote those pieces of it? Do you agree with that? And can you actually save the world? Help us save the world?

Alex McDowell:

It's similar to the very beginning of storytelling. Making sense of the world around us. We're back into that place. We have to make sense of a world around us that is unimaginable, dark, complicated, unknown. Basically it does come back to that idea of grounding, this sort of idea of an impossible change, like two cultures that are in direct opposition as we see right now in the US. How do you start creating common space? How do you zero that in on the possibility of a different future and create new language, or create a sort of opportunity for translation where there's ways of crossing the boundary. Not to sort of be peacemaker—the UN in the center—it's really about, how do these necessary evolutions start weaving more and more together? And by projecting a world that shows where that could already have happened, you start thinking that it's possible in the present.

Charlie Melcher:

I wonder how you're feeling about this age of COVID, and the pandemic, and some of the incredible challenges we're facing right now, and, are you applying your skills to help with these things? Are there real opportunities that you see for world building to help us make good decisions to get ourselves out of this?

Alex McDowell:

Well, first of all I think, what does out of this mean? I think that one of the things we have to do, all of us as world builders, is to imagine that none of this will return to normal. We were doing a “Future of Education” project looking 25 years into the future, again, with universities that were 1000 miles apart. And at that time we imagined something that seemed to be very far fetched, which was a virtual campus, where each of these universities existed side by side in virtual space and then the teachers basically just went from school to school, and the classes were taking the resources of all three. And then it's like ... That was a year ago. And now we realize that 25 year vision actually already happened, basically.

But you design from the ground up. You kind of do that punk thing. You break it all down to the ground, and then you say, "Well, these are the conditions." And that is a really interesting systems design, narrative design problem now. It will come into every aspect of what we're doing because that notion of building a translation engine, a provocation engine, a story engine, those things that we do have to be embedded by the reality of the present. And so it triggers different solutions for everything we're doing.

Charlie Melcher:

Well I really hope that this is a system, or I guess practice, that can be very broadly shared. And it seems if we really could get it into the hands of the next generation, the ones who will have the most opportunity to make the decisions and to act in a way that will bring about positive futures, we could empower them to feel they can create the world that they want to live in.

Alex McDowell:

A very left-field project that we're doing now, just to mention quickly, I think taps into that directly. Which is we are actually building a world inside a cell, the pancreatic beta cell right now, but it could pretty much be inside any cell. The problem there was that generations of scientists have become more and more embedded in their own language, to the point where it was almost impossible to transmit outside the very tight molecular biology kind of system. Our brief there was to allow, essentially, the youth now, high schools and undergrads, to enter that world and understand it.

And so we have had to create a world which uses a completely different language. It's actually used an architectural language. Essentially, a language of folding like origami, of tetrahedra. And it builds a completely new modular system, which is scientifically accurate and uniformly, universally understandable. That, to my mind, is a classic piece of world building. It's changing the tools for the future, right now. It's imagining what the issues are going to be for a 16 year old. How are they going to actually get inside and understand, for example, what's happening now? How do you actually understand what's happening at a cellular level?

And by forgetting about the idea that disciplines cannot merge, that there's this sort of idea, a Victorian industrial idea, that we all learn what we learn, and we have to execute on the discipline that we've learned, we're-

Charlie Melcher:

A guild system, I'd describe it as.

Alex McDowell:

Yeah, and we throw that away. You've got to say, that is of no relevance now. We all have this amazing kind of global imagination. We have very broad capabilities, but if we actually merge that, we're turning, we're creating a powerhouse of possibility, and world building is just a platform that anticipates and expects and enables that to happen. And that's the thing that I think, I hope, that world building will really do, is just create this understanding that there is no limits once you come together in that collaborative, holistic way. That there is really nothing that we cannot take on. And it will be the next generation that's already understood. They're just missing a couple of pieces of machinery to do it.

Charlie Melcher:

That's a beautiful vision, and a wonderful place for us to stop, or I should say pause, because we'll I'm sure be speaking again and continue the conversation. But Alex, thank you so much for being part of the Future of StoryTelling. Everything that you do, everything that you think, it's all based around the same set of principles that we hold dear and near to our hearts at FoST. So thank you for being part of our community.

Alex McDowell:

Absolutely. I was thinking that since we've met actually, we've been kind of joined at the hip because you're deeply engaged in a network around The Future of StoryTelling, and we're deeply engaged in a network around storytelling in the future. So I think we're completely embedded.

Charlie Melcher:

I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. If you'd like to learn more about Alex or watch the FOST film that we made with him, please check out this episode's page on our website by visiting FOST.org, or following the link in the episode's description. Thank you for being a part of The Future of StoryTelling family. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give us a review, and share it with others.

Again, a big thank you to Alex McDowell and to our talented production partner Charts and Leisure. I hope you'll join us in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, be strong, and story on.