“Realistically, I really just don’t know who could possibly want to pick up this book. I just needed to understand why we are where we are, because there’s something fundamentally offensive about it to me. But it’s not like there’s a shortage of people writing about education reform. What need were you filling? The need is, I don’t want to hear anyone’s opinion, and I don’t want to hear what you spent your life working on. I just want to know what everybody found. I have no investment in this. In fact, most of it was counter to what I thought I was going to find. For example, small classroom sizes. How could it be wrong? How could that not be a part of the answer? Or master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers. How could that not be a part of the answer? How could paying teachers like doctors not be a part of the answer? How can funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil not be part of the answer? And yet none of them are. Do you have the same ideas about film? Like, an informal five things that always work in a successful movie? I do have a theory about effective and meaningful movies. What is it between The Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather—what is it that makes those things work when they’re seemingly being approached completely differently? We can get a lot of false positives. A big box-office opening weekend is a false positive. But what sticks with us five years, ten years later? There is something underlying, a set of truths. Can you tell me what they are? Here’s the thing. It probably isn’t that hard. It’s just that it’s so precious to me I don’t even want to say it. Sometimes, when you say something out loud, it dies on the vine. It’s meant to be ineffable. ”
