Academy Award-winning screenwriter! Graham Moore, THE WEALTH OF SHADOWS
[0:02]Hi, I'm Sivi Owens and I am the host of this podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:08]I am also a newly minted USA Today best-selling author of the novel, Blake.
[0:14]I've created a whole community of book lovers around this podcast, a publishing company,
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[0:25]at Zivi Owens or join the community at ZiviReaders.
[0:31]Graham Moore is the author of the wealth of shadows, a novel. Graham is the New York Times best-selling
[0:37]author of The Whole Doubt, The Last Days of Night. Oh my gosh, that was so good.
[0:41]And the Sherlockian. And the Academy award-winning screenwriter of the imitation game for which he
[0:46]also won a Writers Guild of America award. By the way, my brother Teddy Schwartzman produced
[0:52]that movie, the invitation game. And if you want to watch a conversation between Graham and
[0:56]Teddy instead of between Graham and me, you can do so on our YouTube channel at Ziviverse
[1:02]because they did an event together at Zivi's book shop recently. Graham is also the director
[1:06]and co-writer of The Outfit, which was nominated for a British independent film award.
[1:11]Graham was born in Chicago, received a BA in religious history from Columbia University and
[1:15]currently lives in Los Angeles. Welcome, Graham. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have
[1:20]Time to Read Books to discuss the wealth of shadows. Congratulations.
[1:25]Oh my pleasure. Thank you so much for chatting with me. My pleasure. I posted about your book
[1:29]this morning. Actually, although this will come out later this episode. I am so taken with
[1:34]your story. I've been a fan of yours for a long time after reading your last book. And you know,
[1:40]my brother Teddy who produced the invitation game and everything. So I've been through following
[1:43]you from afar. And you're just so good. You're just such a great writer. And anyway, it was
[1:49]Oh, that's so kind of you. Don't tell your brother that that you think that. He'll tell it to me
[1:55]and it'll get in my head and I'll blush and it'll be way too much. So it'll be our secret,
[1:59]but this is our kind words and I appreciate it. Okay. No problem. Can you tell listeners what
[2:04]the wealth of shadows is about? And also, how are you decided to write this book? Sure. The
[2:09]wealth of shadows is based on a true story about a man named Ansel Luxford who basically
[2:16]no one has ever heard of, which is part of why I wanted to write this book about him. In 1939
[2:22]as the war in Europe broke out and the US was kind of a situously neutral in this matter of European
[2:29]conflict. Ansel Luxford was a tax attorney in Saint Paul, Minnesota who felt that the United States
[2:38]was sort of profoundly not taking the Nazi threat seriously enough. And but he was a tax attorney.
[2:44]What could he do? Well, what he did was he ended up joining a clandestine team of economists
[2:51]at the US Treasury Department who were tasked with this top secret mission to crash the Nazi economy.
[2:58]He was sort of a wild tale of this very ordinary guy who sort of found himself deep in a world of
[3:06]espionage and skull-duggery in the dawning days of the Second World War. And when I found the story,
[3:12]I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before. I mean, I'd sort of sort of reading about
[3:16]the economic history of the war. And honestly, I sort of found this guy because I was flipping through
[3:22]kind of various books about the, I was really interested in the economic warfare between the
[3:27]Americans and Germans in World War II. I felt that was something that I hadn't really read about
[3:30]before. This kind of like a shadow war underneath the sort of war of armies and the airplanes
[3:37]and tanks and bullets we've all kind of heard about. And I just kept reading about this one guy
[3:41]who just kept showing up these meetings. It was like I'd read these meeting minutes. And
[3:45]here was Ansel Luxord in a meeting with the president. Here was Ansel Luxord in a meeting
[3:49]in London. Here was Ansel Luxord in a conference in Havana. And I kept going, who is this person
[3:54]where what's his story? Have I never heard of him before? So I started digging no obituaries
[4:01]that have ever been published about him. No one seemed to have written about him at all.
[4:07]And after a few months, I finally found his children, all three of them are still with us today.
[4:13]And I remember finding his daughter. And she, I got her on the phone. And she said, I explained
[4:20]who I was and what I wanted to do. And I think at first she thought I was a scammer or something.
[4:25]Like I was trying to get credit card numbers out of her. Because here I, oh, I'm a
[4:29]novelist and filmmaker from Los Angeles and I want to write this thing like her father.
[4:32]And she was sort of going, yeah, this sounds shady. I don't know. I had to like send her photos
[4:37]of me to prove, no, no, no, this is me. And these are my books that I really am this person.
[4:41]And then she kind of said, oh, wait, I understand. So you want to write a book about my father,
[4:48]but no one's ever heard of it. And I said, yes, that's why I want to write a book about your father.
[4:54]And then I found my way to, she put me in touch with her brothers and Ansel Luxord's youngest
[5:01]child as a, he's a sheep herder in rural Montana. It took me months to get him on the phone.
[5:05]He lives off the grid. You can only connect him via satellite phone. It was, as you might imagine,
[5:10]a whole experience to get him on the line. You know, the satellite phone only connects at certain
[5:14]times. I had to call it like once a week. There's a window where you can get him. I finally got him.
[5:19]What is so excited to speak to him? And I get him on the line. And he says, oh, my sister told me
[5:23]you'd be calling. She said, you want to, you might want to write a novel about my father. And I said,
[5:28]yeah, I think I do. And he said, you know, I've been waiting for this phone call my whole life.
[5:34]Is this about how my dad was secretly a spy? And I paused for a long moment. And I think I said,
[5:44]well, it is now. So let's, let's talk about it. And that's where I think the story that I found
[5:53]in advance of Luxford got, got even stranger and more interesting. Oh, my gosh. Wow. And what
[5:59]about the other kids? They were, they were great. It was, it was great. I mean, it's strange, right?
[6:04]To interview children and say, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to write a novel based on the life of
[6:10]your father. And it's about your mother and about, you know, their relationship and their marriage
[6:14]is a big part of the book. And, you know, obviously anyone is a little weirded out to talk to
[6:20]someone and say, you're writing a novel about my parents' marriage. I don't know. How do I feel
[6:24]about this? Like, what am I going to talk about? But they were, they were great. They've been so
[6:28]supportive. You know, it was interesting hearing debates among the children about whether
[6:33]was dad really a spy? How much of a spy was dad? You know, they have different like all families,
[6:39]they debate the history, right? And they, they have different views. And one of the kids says,
[6:46]oh, no, he wasn't, he, he wasn't a spy. He just, yeah, he kept taking all these business trips
[6:51]to Cairo in the early 50s. But no, he was just a tax lawyer and you're kind of going, yeah,
[6:59]that's not a, that's not a tax lawyer thing in 1951. But it was amazing here. There's stories in
[7:05]here where they'd agree and then disagree. And I will, I will confess that I was never more nervous
[7:09]to show the book to anyone than to the children when I was, I was finished sort of sending them
[7:13]this novel and saying here's, here's a, here's a novel. There's a piece of historical fiction
[7:16]I've written in very much based on the lives of your father and mother. And I will say my most
[7:21]gratifying moment. I'm finishing the book came when his daughter read it and she called me and said,
[7:27]what does she say? She said, I will confess it was a little weird for me at first to read a novel
[7:33]about my parents' marriage. But I love it and you really capture them and I'm so supportive of this
[7:39]and it was really, it meant the world to me here that they've been so supportive of the book.
[7:43]Oh, that's amazing. Well, the book does have such strong characters, right? So you, like in any
[7:50]novel, you feel very invested and your emotions are tied up with them and you're rooting for them
[7:55]and rooting against them and all the things. But you also have so much interesting backstory
[8:00]and I am not someone who's particularly interested in economics. I took it once and I went to
[8:05]business schools. I had to take some classes, but this is not something that like I would choose to
[8:09]necessarily read about, but you've made it so interesting, almost like how you describe
[8:14]Ansel's ability to like turn his number charts into, you know, beautiful narratives or whatever,
[8:21]however you described it. But some of the things that we're going on between Germany and the
[8:27]other countries from South America to the US to everywhere and the shadow currency and the secret
[8:34]bank accounts and of the German Jews in the US and like all of these things like have blown my mind
[8:41]and that I did not realize were going on and I don't know if maybe other maybe I just wasn't paying
[8:47]attention, but I feel like this is part of the narrative that is definitely not and maybe that's
[8:50]what you're referring to, but not in the popular vernacular of how another way that Jews were
[8:57]stripped of their rights and things. I don't know. Tell me about how you discovered all this and
[9:03]what you knew what you didn't know. Yeah. I'm glad to hear you say all of that because honestly,
[9:09]I knew none of this history going into it either. This is all new information to me and you
[9:15]the description you just gave. I mean, you have more of a background in economics than I did going
[9:19]into this. I never took an economics class in college. I just had nothing, which is part of why I was
[9:24]interested in writing this. I think I keep sort of choosing these big topics that I do nothing
[9:29]about so that I get to spend a bunch of time learning about them going into the imitation game.
[9:35]I knew very little about mathematics. I had to learn a bunch going into this. I knew very
[9:40]little about economics. That was really fascinating. It was obviously a little bit daunting to get
[9:46]my head around a lot of it. I think there was a long research process learning the economic
[9:51]history of the war and as you were saying, as you were saying, the so much
[10:00]but it was sort of a narrative of the war
[10:01]that I'd never heard before,
[10:02]especially the period between 1939 and 1941.
[10:06]You know, I'm American, you're American.
[10:10]I think as Americans, we are sort of used to talking
[10:14]about World War I as this thing,
[10:17]or at least I'm used to talking about World War I,
[10:19]or World War II as this thing that started
[10:21]in December of 1941 with Pearl Harbor.
[10:24]And, you know, what the book is mostly about
[10:26]is the period that the years before that
[10:29]or the war in Europe was going on,
[10:30]and the American government was saying,
[10:32]we're not picking sides.
[10:33]I mean, I didn't even know before getting into the book
[10:35]that the US had passed as sort of this neutrality law,
[10:39]saying that the US government is in as late as 39,
[10:42]including after the invasion of Poland,
[10:44]the US had this law saying we,
[10:45]the federal government is not picking sides
[10:48]between Nazi Germany and Britain.
[10:49]We are not picking sides between Nazi Germany and France.
[10:52]I didn't even know that was the case
[10:54]before getting into the research process in the book.
[10:56]And that seems sort of wild to me.
[10:57]And that was part of why this unit of economists
[11:01]at Treasury had to be so secretive,
[11:03]because what they were doing was very much illegal.
[11:05]They said, yes, we're officially in neutral,
[11:08]but no, we're not doing that.
[11:10]And this threat is real and it's serious,
[11:13]and if we don't get involved now,
[11:14]we're certainly gonna have to get involved later.
[11:17]So, but we're economists.
[11:19]So what can we do?
[11:19]Well, what we can do is hit the Germans in their wallets
[11:25]and try and really invent the concept of economic warfare.
[11:28]I mean, I think the sort of economic warfare
[11:30]that they invented was something
[11:31]that hadn't really existed prior.
[11:34]So it was a great process for you to sort of learn all of that.
[11:39]I think in some ways then as you were talking about
[11:41]to go, you have to go write a book about it,
[11:43]you have to sort of explain some of these complicated
[11:45]concepts to readers.
[11:47]I think, I guess I would say that I think readers
[11:50]are so much savvier that we often give audiences credit
[11:54]for being like, I really believe that readers
[11:57]are at least as smart as I am and can figure out
[12:01]if I can come to understand these concepts,
[12:03]so can my readers.
[12:04]If someone has dumbed me, you can figure it out.
[12:06]I'm sure they'll be able to get their heads around it.
[12:09]That's it's deeply what I believe.
[12:11]And in some ways, what I'm kind of trying to get
[12:14]the readers inside the minds of these characters,
[12:16]Ansel and the other economists on his team, you know,
[12:20]I'm, what I've always found is you can describe things.
[12:24]If the thing I'm describing is terribly important
[12:27]to the characters in the scenes,
[12:30]they'll become terribly important to the readers.
[12:33]Like, yes, some bit of, I don't know,
[12:36]in our team a bit of how the German bond system worked,
[12:40]might seem kind of, yeah, like it might seem kind of
[12:43]esoteric and inessential, but if the,
[12:48]to these characters, to Ansel Luxford and his teammates,
[12:51]this is the most important thing in the world.
[12:54]And the fate of human civilization hangs on this quirk
[12:58]of the German bond market.
[13:00]So there is nothing in the world more important
[13:03]to these characters than this point of economics.
[13:06]So when they're arguing about it,
[13:08]they're really arguing about it.
[13:09]And I think that kind of emotional way in really helps me
[13:12]sort of get first my head into some of these complicated
[13:15]concepts and then I think the readers heads into them as well.
[13:18]And honestly, because there's such a long research process,
[13:21]there was such a long research process for this book.
[13:23]When I'm describing these things, you know,
[13:27]what I'm writing a year or two after having done this research,
[13:30]I'm always kind of telling myself,
[13:32]okay, how would I describe this to myself a year ago?
[13:35]Like, to me a year ago, who knew none of this,
[13:38]what's the description that I would have understood
[13:41]well enough to get the gist of this
[13:43]while continuing to move along?
[13:46]And then I will say, you know,
[13:47]towards the latter stage of the book, finishing it.
[13:50]I had kind of three reeminent economists come in
[13:53]and redrafts and help correct some errors.
[13:56]And that was very nerve wracking for me
[13:57]because I felt like I was a naughty student getting called
[14:00]into the principal's office.
[14:01]And they were going to correct my term papers
[14:03]and I was very flattered that frankly all three of them
[14:07]kind of said, this is shockingly accurate.
[14:11]This is so much more accurate that I expected it to be.
[14:13]And there were bits in here that I didn't even know.
[14:15]And that made me feel like I'd done
[14:17]my research pretty thoroughly and had figured out a way
[14:21]to communicate these complicated concepts in a way
[14:24]that was both accurate and have like emotional valence.
[14:29]Like you're getting it through the characters,
[14:31]not just sort of, it's not just a history lesson.
[14:33]It's this period of American history
[14:36]as rendered through these people
[14:37]and the things that are on their minds.
[14:39]Well, to that point, there are a couple times
[14:43]when one of the characters is describing something
[14:45]to someone else like when they were describing
[14:49]the system to Moynihan or something.
[14:51]And I could see, and then White says something like,
[14:55]no, make it simpler.
[14:56]Like, and I'm like, did Graham more know
[15:00]that this was sounding a little confusing
[15:01]and so he decided to insert this
[15:04]so that he would make it more clear in the next paragraph
[15:06]or what?
[15:08]Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.
[15:09]Yes, that was very much the point of that section.
[15:11]And we had, in Morgan Thao,
[15:14]who was the Treasury Secretary at the time
[15:15]he was the Treasury Secretary.
[15:18]He was Jewish, he was the only Jewish cabinet member
[15:19]or that becomes sort of a point in the book.
[15:21]Sorry, did I say that right?
[15:22]I think that was so sorry.
[15:24]Morgan.
[15:25]No, no, it's fine.
[15:26]Sorry.
[15:27]No, it's fine.
[15:28]So he had, this was interesting to me as well
[15:29]that Morgan Thao had as much of an economic background
[15:33]as I did when he became the Treasury Secretary.
[15:35]He had no background in economics whatsoever.
[15:37]He was just really good friends with the president.
[15:39]And nowadays, I think we expect our cabinet secretaries
[15:43]to be somewhat more, I don't know, qualified or educated
[15:48]than was the norm in the 1930s.
[15:51]But so when I realized how little background
[15:55]the Treasury Secretary had,
[15:56]it actually ended up being really helpful
[15:58]because there's the senior talking about where
[16:01]and so Luxford, our lead character from whom,
[16:04]from who's perspective, we're getting this whole story
[16:06]is sort of led into Morgan Thao's office
[16:08]and told, okay, you have to explain
[16:09]this really complicated concept to the Treasury Secretary.
[16:13]And basically, and if you don't do it, you're fired.
[16:15]Like your job is on the line here.
[16:16]And so he's struggling to explain it in a simple way
[16:20]and Morgan Thao keeps not quite getting it
[16:23]and sort of as you're saying,
[16:25]you're like, wait, sorry, that was simpler, simpler.
[16:28]And so yeah, that ended up being a great technique
[16:31]for getting information to an audience in a really,
[16:35]like organic way.
[16:37]And it's always helpful when you have characters
[16:40]who genuinely wouldn't know some of this.
[16:41]So someone needs to go explain it to them
[16:43]to sort of get their heads around it.
[16:45]But also someone really smart,
[16:46]like Morgan Thao's a smart,
[16:47]he's asking smart questions about, wait,
[16:50]I don't go back because I didn't actually quite make sense
[16:52]to me, what's the point?
[16:54]Like he's a smart questioner and sort of probing
[16:56]answer into giving an even more distinct
[16:59]and also compelling explanation of this point
[17:03]of economics.
[17:04]And funny too, when he's like, yeah,
[17:06]you think there are a lot of pork farmers
[17:08]and a lot of Jewish pork farmers out there,
[17:10]and he's like, oh, he's funny.
[17:12]He is, but yeah, he tries to go,
[17:14]and Morgan Thao is a really fun character, right?
[17:15]It's fun, and some of this story was really true.
[17:17]I mean, I was really interested in this idea
[17:19]that this team at Treasury basically went
[17:21]to Morgan Thao, the Treasury Secretary.
[17:23]He was the only Jewish cabinet secretary.
[17:26]He was very aware of that.
[17:27]And this becomes a point in the book
[17:29]where he's basically saying,
[17:30]more than other cabinet secretaries,
[17:33]I can't be seen to do anything to stop the Germans
[17:36]because I'm the only Jewish one.
[17:38]And I'm the one who's doing this.
[17:40]It's gonna seem like I'm biased or something.
[17:44]But this seems from my research very much the case.
[17:46]This team basically went to Morgan Thao and said,
[17:48]hey, we have to be neutral.
[17:50]We know it's the laws.
[17:51]We have to be neutral here,
[17:51]but that's not what we're gonna do.
[17:53]And we're gonna go do this thing
[17:54]and you really want us to stop
[17:57]and Morgan Thao basically went to the president and said,
[18:00]this is gonna happen, you and I don't know about it.
[18:04]And both when we were at the president,
[18:08]basically they said, hands over my ears,
[18:11]nah nah nah, I didn't hear that.
[18:13]Let's pretend this never happened.
[18:15]As long as it doesn't show up in the newspapers,
[18:17]we never know any of this.
[18:18]And what they do, what this group of people does
[18:21]is what this group of people does is gonna do.
[18:23]And I think that's pretty remarkable
[18:25]that they had the good sense to pretend not to know
[18:27]what was really going on.
[18:29]So you give us a glimpse into your process
[18:32]through the notes,
[18:32]which I found really entertaining in and of themselves.
[18:35]And I'm like, when is the last time I read notes?
[18:37]But the way you wrote the notes,
[18:39]it's like part of the book on us, like a coda.
[18:41]And in some of them, you have to,
[18:43]you explain why you move timelines and this and that.
[18:45]And then you were describing someone's marriage.
[18:49]I think it, whose marriage was it.
[18:50]Anyway, somebody.
[18:51]So maybe John Maynard Keynes, yeah.
[18:53]Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
[18:54]And you were like, he liked men,
[18:56]but he lives in love with his wife, but this.
[18:58]And then you were like, whatever,
[19:00]like people are complicated.
[19:02]I was like, that's really funny.
[19:03]You know, like that, you don't usually find that
[19:05]the notes actually.
[19:06]So the way you clearly have such a grasp on all the things
[19:10]enough to like really sort of massage details
[19:13]and timelines and everything.
[19:14]I can't even imagine like the note,
[19:17]like how did you accomplish this?
[19:19]Did you have stuff everywhere?
[19:21]Like is this a visual thing for you?
[19:23]Like, how did you do this?
[19:24]Are we just moving things around in documents?
[19:27]It's a really good question.
[19:28]And yeah, I think one of the techniques
[19:29]I use a lot in sort of historical fiction
[19:32]is kind of timeline reworking a little bit.
[19:35]Sort of to reneurivize.
[19:37]Moving things around a little bit,
[19:38]simplifying timeline, something that takes place,
[19:41]something in the real world was like three meetings
[19:44]just turns into one meeting or one scene
[19:47]for the purpose of the novel.
[19:48]And so yeah, so for a lot of that
[19:51]and for sort of figuring out the first question
[19:54]in the process is always all right.
[19:55]So what's the real history?
[19:55]Let's try and really drill down on what really happened.
[19:59]And
[20:00]with something like this, what do we know happened?
[20:03]And then what are we just not sure about?
[20:06]Because for a story like this, so much it was secret.
[20:09]There's just so much, there's just so much we don't know.
[20:12]There's so much that we don't have records for.
[20:15]And with this, what actually happened was,
[20:17]as I think I say any authors know at the end of the book,
[20:20]I was doing this research and I found this wonderful
[20:22]scholar at the US Holocaust Museum, and she,
[20:25]I didn't even realize that they had these kind of
[20:27]resident scholars who are just sort of around to do
[20:29]research and help out.
[20:31]They have no teaching responsibilities,
[20:32]they have no publishing responsibilities.
[20:35]They're just there to, they do some research
[20:37]and I got her on the phone and said,
[20:39]hey, this is what I'm interested in.
[20:40]And I think she's written,
[20:41]she'd written some things that are kind of,
[20:42]a bit related to this group of treasury.
[20:44]And she said, oh great, yeah, sure, happy to help you.
[20:48]Actually, I found this box in the basement
[20:51]of the treasury department a couple years ago.
[20:53]And this box had the only copy of a typed up history
[20:59]of this secret unit at treasury written by them.
[21:03]They wrote this little history of what they've done.
[21:05]Just for themselves as a sort of,
[21:07]we don't have anyone's gonna read this,
[21:08]we don't have anyone's gonna care.
[21:10]We don't know if we're gonna win the war
[21:11]and any of us are gonna be alive, you know,
[21:14]to enjoy this little history years from now.
[21:17]But this is what happened.
[21:19]And they kind of wrote this and stuffed it into a box
[21:23]in the basement of the treasury.
[21:24]And it was 700 pages long.
[21:26]And she sort of, I'm on the phone with her
[21:28]and she's telling me, oh yes, I found this box.
[21:30]It's like written by the characters in your book.
[21:32]And it's their history from their perspective
[21:33]of what really happened.
[21:35]And no one's ever digitized it.
[21:37]There's just one copy sitting in the basement of the treasury.
[21:39]But she says her name was Rebecca Erbalding,
[21:41]the scholar, she's wonderful.
[21:42]Rebecca said, oh, but I took my cell phone
[21:45]and I snapped photographs of every page.
[21:48]Do you want me to send you the cell phone photos?
[21:52]And I said, yes, Rebecca, I do.
[21:55]And so the next day, 700 cell phone snapshots
[21:59]of individual pages of this history show up.
[22:03]And that was amazing.
[22:04]Cause that was something, to my knowledge,
[22:07]no one else has ever seen these pages.
[22:09]They're just, they're like sitting on my phone right now.
[22:13]Cause they're just these cell phone photos, right?
[22:15]They're like next to the pictures of my kids
[22:17]in a folder on my cell phone.
[22:19]And the, so going through that was really helpful
[22:23]cause you're getting, okay, this is what happened
[22:25]according to them.
[22:26]But even, I mean, there's so much kind of espionage going on.
[22:28]Even some of that, I don't think they were being totally honest
[22:31]cause we, I was working with one of my research assistants.
[22:33]And we were kind of going through this one section
[22:34]where they're saying it was actually the bit
[22:36]that you were talking about a minute ago about sort of how
[22:39]the secret method by which the Nazis were confiscating
[22:42]the bank accounts of Jews around the world.
[22:45]And it just says there's something in the text,
[22:48]I'm probably going to mingle the language somewhat,
[22:50]but it says in their history that they wrote,
[22:53]it says, well, information came to us that this was happening.
[22:58]So we decided to go and do X, Y, and Z.
[23:01]And I remember reading that and going information came to you.
[23:05]What does that mean?
[23:07]That sounds like espionage to me.
[23:10]And so even in this history, they're not being totally honest
[23:14]about what they're really doing and where they're really
[23:16]learning things and how they're really learning things.
[23:19]So I think in putting everything together,
[23:20]we tried to make these really, really detailed charts
[23:24]and timelines and sort of day to day timelines
[23:26]of what was really going on, getting
[23:28]as many photographs as possible.
[23:30]I really love the photographs of all the scenes
[23:32]of all the where they were, the offices,
[23:34]the furniture store where they ended moving in
[23:36]to build their offices.
[23:38]And then sort of saying, okay, what do we want to focus on?
[23:42]Narratively, what can we kind of condense
[23:45]that the things we can smoosh together for simplicity to say?
[23:48]And I think something that unites this book with,
[23:53]frankly, all my previous plans is I'm really interested
[23:55]in perspective, like the books
[23:57]that these really, really precisely delineated perspectives.
[24:00]They're from one person's perspective.
[24:02]This book is from Antilocksford for Perspective.
[24:04]It's a close third person, third person narration.
[24:08]He is, we are sort of inside his head the entire book.
[24:11]And we never see anything he doesn't see.
[24:13]We never learn anything we don't.
[24:15]He doesn't know, we never hear anything.
[24:16]He doesn't hear.
[24:17]And so in a way, a guy just sort of wrestling the history
[24:22]down into something understandable
[24:25]and something kind of traumatizable is, okay,
[24:27]well, what was his experience of it?
[24:28]Like what was he there for?
[24:31]What were the events that were important to him?
[24:34]What were the bits, there's a bit in the book
[24:37]about the first time he's getting on a military plane
[24:40]to go to Havana for a sort of the secret conference
[24:45]that he has sort of a secret agenda at?
[24:47]And you're like, oh, right, from his perspective,
[24:50]three months ago, this guy was a tax attorney
[24:53]in St. Paul, Minnesota.
[24:54]And now he's on this military plane
[24:56]going to a secret conference with a secret agenda
[24:57]that he's trying to enact.
[24:59]That must have felt insane to him.
[25:03]So that's gonna be a big point in the book.
[25:04]That must have just felt, so my goal is always kind of
[25:09]of looking it from a place of like what,
[25:11]for all kinds of feeling, like what would feel
[25:13]the most important to him.
[25:14]And let's focus on those bits.
[25:18]And he had never even left the country
[25:20]although they were explaining it was a technicality,
[25:22]but still crazy.
[25:23]Yeah, no, I was trying to find a team
[25:25]like he hadn't left the country before that.
[25:26]I mean, it seems so amazing, right?
[25:28]He was just this really normal guy.
[25:31]I think that was part of the, frankly for me,
[25:33]like the autobiographical part of the book
[25:34]that I was feeling like this kind of middle-aged dad
[25:39]in sort of like a happy, comfortable place in my career.
[25:43]But going, you know, what, imagine, okay,
[25:46]if the end of the world, if this was 1939,
[25:48]if it felt like the end of the world was happening around me,
[25:52]what would I be able to do about it?
[25:54]Because I think Ansel Lux very much felt the same way.
[25:56]I think it felt to him like the world was ending
[25:58]and as a tax attorney, what could he do about it?
[26:01]Yeah, I was just gonna say, it actually does
[26:04]almost feel like the world is ending right now.
[26:06]I mean, as this book is coming out
[26:07]and Ansel, you know, in your opening scene,
[26:10]he's looking at the march out the window of the trolley.
[26:14]And it's go, now we're in a time where there are marches
[26:18]like this all the time.
[26:19]Again, like it's all happening again
[26:21]and your book, like couldn't be better timed.
[26:24]I mean, you know, Yay for book marketing
[26:26]and timing and all of that, he would have known.
[26:28]But it's terrifying, you know, it's terrifying.
[26:30]And I hope, I'd like to think that there is a group
[26:33]of lots of groups of people working on trying to solve
[26:36]these bigger problems that we just don't know about.
[26:38]So I'm hoping that that is occurring, but who knows?
[26:42]From your lips to God's ears.
[26:44]Yeah, one hopes, it is funny.
[26:46]I mean, sort of the book, gosh, in early 2020.
[26:50]And so a lot of these sort of things had the things
[26:53]in on the front page of the newspaper
[26:54]say just hadn't happened yet.
[26:55]And so it almost came as grim sort of joke
[26:59]because we were working on it where, you know,
[27:01]the invasion of Ukraine happens.
[27:03]And then, you know, I'm on the phone with my editor
[27:05]and we're kind of going, oh gosh, we,
[27:08]it's even made a joke.
[27:09]Like, were you trying to be this topical?
[27:12]And I was kind of going, no, I really didn't think
[27:14]this was topical at all.
[27:15]And then here we are.
[27:17]But I think, but that maybe that was one of the things
[27:20]that was also interesting to me is that these questions
[27:24]are not questions we ever would assign.
[27:28]Like the questions, the moral questions
[27:31]facing people in 1939 are not moral questions
[27:34]that have left us.
[27:36]They're moral questions that confront all of us still
[27:38]and we'll confront all of us a hundred years from now
[27:40]in different forms.
[27:42]And I think that's, I think it's been like
[27:45]about historical fiction is that I get to write about 1939,
[27:50]but excise all of my own anxieties and fears
[27:54]and thoughts about 2024.
[27:57]Yeah, and that is nice.
[28:00]Hopefully this is not in the same way,
[28:02]like a preamble to a giant war.
[28:05]But we'll see what happens.
[28:06]Let's hope we don't quit, get there, yeah.
[28:07]Well, we'll just keep reading your book
[28:09]and see what happens next in our world.
[28:11]I know we have to go now, but I just want like a quick thing.
[28:14]What was it like to win an Academy Award?
[28:16]Like was that just amazing to go on stage?
[28:18]Like just what was that moment like for you?
[28:20]Oh, it was great.
[28:23]It was such a delight.
[28:24]It's funny, it was, look, it was wonderful.
[28:28]I think it's funny.
[28:30]I think sometimes people, friends of mine
[28:32]will ask me that question and will expect me
[28:34]to reveal some kind of like dark underbelly of,
[28:37]oh, you know, be careful what you wish for.
[28:39]No, don't be careful what you wish for.
[28:41]It was great.
[28:42]It was so much fun.
[28:43]My mom was my date.
[28:45]We got to go to all the parties afterwards.
[28:47]I have a photograph that remains on my phone
[28:51]of my mother at three in the morning that night
[28:54]in her gown in my hotel room.
[28:58]Like she's sitting on the floor of my hotel room,
[29:00]eating popcorn and just staring at the gold trophy
[29:03]in her hands.
[29:04]And the fact that my mom was up at three in the morning
[29:06]tells you all you need to know about what that night
[29:09]must have been like for us.
[29:10]No, there was this tremendous thing.
[29:11]And I think while unexpected, it was sort of gratifying
[29:16]and fun and it was a good, both a lovely moment,
[29:19]frankly for everyone on that film.
[29:20]I think we all got to sort of celebrate it together.
[29:23]I think as your brother knows, we made it sort of quickly
[29:26]and it was all very like carried.
[29:28]And everyone was doing their best.
[29:29]And we didn't have a lot of time to sort of,
[29:31]while we were making it, we didn't have a lot of time
[29:32]to sit back and relax and have a glass of wine together
[29:36]and tell stories and get to know each other.
[29:39]We were all sort of work, work, work, work.
[29:41]And so then kind of getting to go to the Academy Awards
[29:44]together and getting to celebrate together
[29:47]felt for the team as if like, okay, we can finally
[29:51]get to enjoy each other as human beings for a little bit.
[29:53]And we'd like each other very much.
[29:55]But no, I think that trophy itself remains something
[29:58]that was a good...
[30:00]good, a good confidence booster for me of sort of like pick, pick the stories that I really
[30:06]care about. Go write those stories and hopefully there will be people out there who are
[30:13]as entranced by these tales as much as I am.
[30:16]Okay, thank. Well, I have a million more questions, but if I ever try to steal someone's
[30:22]iPhone to check out their photos, it will clearly be yours is basically what I'm talking
[30:27]away from this conversation. Anyway, congratulations. Thank you so much. And yeah,
[30:32]best of luck with everything. Thanks, I really appreciate it. Okay, take care. Bye bye. Bye bye.