The Shift is About to Hit the Fan!

TLC Interview with Tom Shadyac
by Liv Kellgren

TLC: So, Tom, would you give us a little background on your career as a filmmaker and what kind of life were you leading then?

Tom Shadyac: Oh, wow. I’ve been in show business over 20 years. My break, if you will, was a film called Ace Ventura, starring a little-known actor, known at the time as the white guy on In Living Color, Jim Carrey. And from there, Ace led to The Nutty Professor with Eddie Murphy, and then I did another one with Jim, Liar, Liar and Patch Adams, and recently I’ve done the Almighty’s, Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty.

So I’ve done about seven films as a director, a couple as a producer. And as you know, when your films—my films have grossed somewhere in the ballpark of $2 billion, you are paid rather—I’ll even use the word “crazily.” So lots of resources come your way, and you get, if you will, the spoils of victory.

And I like to emphasize the word “spoil” because there’s an energy to it. And I sort of got involved in a lifestyle that I thought was what we were all to do. It’s what I was sort of taught to do within this cultural paradigm, which was to get a house that reflects that success, to travel privately, to acquire a lot of things and material wealth, like paintings and carpets and antiques, etcetera.

And as I did this, I kind of found it all to be a false promise. It did nothing for my self in terms of happiness or a feeling of meaning or purpose in the world. And I began to call it into question and move into a different direction.

The more I’ve gotten involved in serving others and in causes from Free the Slaves—there’s 27 million slaves still in the world—to the Child Soldier problem in Uganda with Invisible Children, these are the things that have really paid. So I feel like someone who participated in a system and in a model that didn’t bear fruit. And so now I feel like I’m experimenting with my life and participating in a different way that is bearing a much richer, deeper fruit.

TLC: What facilitated that change for you?

Tom Shadyac: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I just like to go where the joy is. If I walked into the mansion and heard the heavens open and the angelic choir singing, I would be reporting that and urging everyone to do the same. But that’s not what happened. I walked into my first Beverly Hills home and felt quite the opposite, that this really didn’t do anything.

So often people think about what I’ve moved away from. I look at it as what I’m embracing, and I’m embracing now simplicity, which we know many spiritualists have said the three keys to the spiritual life are simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

I’m embracing simplicity. I’m embracing community. I’m embracing service. And it’s not a life at all about what I would call sacrifice or austerity. I still have a beautiful, you know, small place, but a place that services my needs and my passions. I still can surf everyday, and I can still get on a mountain bike and explore nature.

So it’s just a different emphasis. I like to look at it as moving towards rather than away from something.

In I Am, you brought quite a collection of fantastic people into that dialogue. Dr. Howard Zinn. Lynne McTaggart, Bishop Desmond Tutu. Would you talk a little bit about how you chose these people and what you learned from them?

Well, each of the interviewees in the documentary were people who had affected me at some point on my journey. So they helped peel a layer of the onion away, if you will, and help me to see things differently.

So Howard Zinn, for example, wrote A People’s History of the United States. I was brought up with the history of one side of our story, but it conveniently ignored the treatment of the African-American, the enslavement of the African-American, the decimation of the population of the—of the native population when we came here. How we built our infrastructures on the back of immigrant labor. Howard Zinn told me that story, and he helped to open me up to a larger truth.

Each person in the movie, there’s a story I could tell you about. Coleman Barks, who translates the Rumi poetry, Rumi is a mystic poet, possibly the most popular poet still today in the world. And I believe Rumi saw things as they really are. He saw through to reality. And that would be what—even what we call quantum physic reality now, the connection, the energy, the source, if you will. And Coleman’s poetry, his translations, really edified me. And they buoyed me as I walked in my own life.

And I noticed that even the mystic poets were saying the same things as the scientists, were saying the same things as the philosophers, as the humanitarians. And so Coleman was someone I wanted to represent the poetic vision, if you will, again, which I think lines up with all these other disciplines.

What inspired you to create this movie?

Well, it took a good knock on the head. I fell of my bike and literally had to get knocked out of my head and into my heart. Because these things that we talk about in I Am, the things that I’ve called into question and have shifted in my life has been going on for over ten years.

I just reread my journals, and you can see these questions have been longstanding in my life, and the shifts have been coming over a long period of time. But I didn’t have the courage to bring that forth in terms of a movie or talk about it directly in my art. So when I faced my own death, which was after this bike accident, and I had a very, very bad concussion called post-concussion syndrome where the systems just don’t go away from the original concussion, I didn’t think I was going to live. I didn’t think I had much time left.

I thought this is my last chapter, and if this is it for me, what—is there anything I want to express before I go? And I simply didn’t want to die with this conversation inside of me. I wanted to share it. I wanted to offer it to people, my own journey, so it could spark possibly a conversation in their own ways.

And the most common comment we get after people see I Am is they thank us for expressing what was in their hearts, but they didn’t find being expressed in the world. So whatever it is that is inhabiting me and has been on my heart for so many years, I’m finding the serendipitous connection with so many others because I think there’s something deep and true about the principles that we talk about.

Was that the reaction that you were hoping for as you were making this movie?

Well, I think all art wants to communicate, and so as an artist, you really hope that something you have done and something that is inhabiting you is relatable. And I did have that hope and that belief that people felt similarly. If you peel all the artifices away, that underneath it, we all have this feeling that things can be different and that we’re different and that we’re more powerful than we’ve been taught. We’re more miraculous than we’ve been taught. And what has been encouraging and even surprising is the number of people that have felt exactly as we’ve expressed in the film.

It does feel like the time is right and the time is now.

I agree. I think the economy is not being fixed for a reason, because it’s built on principles that are not long lasting nor even wise. We see this problem in our environment. Inarguably something is going on. We know we’re poisoning, at the very least, the air and water systems, and species are going extinct every day. And so something is happening.

And I think that we all can sense that we can’t fix this mechanically. That there’s probably a deeper fix to this, and that is a fix about who we are in our spirit and how we walk that spirit in the world. And I believe that. You know when An Inconvenient Truth got in the zeitgeist, it was just time. It was time. We had been potentially damaging the environment for many, many years before it, but a critical mass had come where it was time that we understood what some of our behavior was doing.

And I feel the same way about this film. That this may be the inconvenient truth for the spiritual crisis, the emotional crisis that’s going on amongst our species.

I’m glad you mentioned emotional crisis. You talk a lot in the film about competition versus coop-eration and also loneliness. Would you talk a little bit about loneliness for us?

The most basic behavior of a human being is a connected behavior. It happens from the second of inception. You are born because of a loving act, a coming together of a male and a female energy, two people.

The second you are born, your first, most instinctive act, is to not only require milk from another human being, nutrition from another human being, but love. We know that when children were left alone back in the ‘40s, children were—there were many orphan children after the war. And we thought that they would be best served by not giving them much human stimulation. They not only went into depression, and their physical health suffered. Those children even died.

So we know that human beings need each other. We need each other. And yet we sort of have a philosophy that is askew with that. We’re told to take care of ourselves first. We’re told to be number one. That’s that competition that you talked about. And I believe we’re competitive in our nature. I have no question about it. If you put two runners next to each other, it’s really fascinating to see who can run the fastest.

The problem is we elevate the winner rather than celebrate the winner. We separate the winners out from our culture. We give them all the toys, the spoils, if you will. We bow at their feet, and I think that’s what has to shift. We have to celebrate that, whether it’s an art or whether it’s a skill someone has, but not elevate it.

So we’re taught to separate from each other. Take care of yourself. Put yourself in this house. Get a fence up. Make sure none of your neighbors can see. Make sure you have not just privacy but security beyond security. And that, I think, goes against who we are and what makes us flourish.

So, for example, I’ve kind of experimented at taking down the gates in my life. And I live in a beautiful mobile home community, and I know all my neighbors. And I find that experience has buoyed my happiness. It’s fun—it’s five minutes to go 20 feet—you run into everybody. And there’s small talk, and there’s quirkiness, and there’s real life.

But you’re in it with a group of people that become family. And those are the things that positive psychology now is studying and saying this is what makes cultures happy, when they’re organically tied together. And our society, because of specialization which happened 10,000 years ago when we invented agriculture, we stopped doing things communally like we used to. We used to all hunt and gather. We used to all be a part of that process.

But then it was, oh, no, I can do the food. You go out and you build the hut, and you go out and you—maybe you be the writer, and you do the art. So we started separating ourselves, and we lost the beauty of the social connection.

It’s even what Einstein said is the major problem in the world is we’ve lost our organic tie with each other. We see the social function now as a negativity. How can I get enough for myself? And when we start to turn that upside down and we see the social function as the positive, that’s when we really become more human. And as we become more human, we become more edified and more blessed.

And then comes cooperation.

Yes. This idea that human beings are only competitive because of the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest is a partial truth at best. Darwin himself defined sympathy as mankind’s strongest trait. We talk about it in the film.

If you look at our species, we’re just not that magnificent when it comes to our physical ability, our speed, our strength. But when you look at what we can do together, that’s when we become miraculous, and he saw that. He said that how’s this little species going to survive, this kind of weak species. He said they have the ability to cooperate.

So cooperation, I believe, has been evolving in us, and it’s a biologically, physiologically supported trait, so that when you are in a loving, kind, compassionate state, which are the states of cooperation, it actually renews your physiology. It actually boosts your immune system. You’re in a better cognitive functioning state.

And when you’re in the opposite state, when you’re frustrated, angry, competitive, we know that it breaks down your physiology, that you get early-onset stress diseases. So that, to me, speaks about who you really are when you look at the meat and marrow of us, at the very cell structure of us. That we are hardwired for cooperation because that’s how we will survive as a species.

Is by doing it together.

And I love the fact that “together,” if you break down the word, it’s “to get there.” So you just have to add an “E.” But I think to get there together, and I think that’s how we’ll get there is together. We just need a rallying point, you know. Like it’s easy for the Los Angeles fans to get together around the Lakers. So I think that we’re all a part of this world now, that the world needs us to come together. And we’re sensing that more and more and more. We’re all part of Team Earth, if you will.

Absolutely. I’m glad you mentioned Darwin. It sounds like he needs a new PR person.

Yes. If you read Darwin and just simply look around, Darwin didn’t write the only book on human nature and nature itself. Nature is in front of us for our own study, and nature is one big cooperative. And when things are not cooperating in nature—when they take more than they need—they will simply die off. So eventually you will see a kudzu line, which will eat everything in its path. It will eventually have no more food. It will eat its own nutritious supply, and it will eventually die off.

So nature is its own instructor, you know. All of nature is instructing us. And it’s showing us that even the rainforest is a cooperative, the sea is a cooperative. These things that have been evolving in the natural world over billions and billions of years, cells are cooperative. And when cells go rogue and cancerous, they will eventually die because they eat their host.

So there are many of the principles that we apply even to our economic life, are more like that of a cell that’s gone rogue, that says I can take whatever I want, eat whatever I want, get whatever I can get. And it’s not in cooperation with other living things around it, and that’s just not long-term thinking.

What would you like us to take away from I Am?

I hope people will start a conversation about this. The Sufis believed there were three ways of reaching the divine. Prayer was one. Meditation was another. And conversation. Conversation allows us to convert each other.

So I hope the movie will meet them right where they are, and they’ll have the courage to just talk, go to their wife, their husband, their friends, their family and say, hey, I saw a film that made me think about something. And even if they think an idea is crazy, that’s a good place to start. I think this guy’s crazy. He kind of thinks this way. And at least be open to the conversation. That’s what I hope.

Thanks so much for joining us today, Tom.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.