E171 - Taking Your Life Back (w/ Tom Shkolnik)

Tom Shkolnik returns to discuss his upcoming film A Life of One’s Own, based on the life of psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner. Today he explains Milner’s undogmatic, exploratory style, rooted in her rejection of post–World War I societal norms. 

Tom and Alex explore key ideas from A Life of One’s Own, including Milner’s practice of tracking happiness, her distinction between “wide” versus “narrow” attention, the joy of purposelessness and much more. Shkolnik describes crafting his nontraditional, scriptless film, alongside reflections on the film-world’s current crisis and the importance of creative freedom. 

Tom is the director of the 2012 British drama The Comedian nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2012 London film festival. He is the director of an upcoming film based on the book A Life of One's Own by psychoanalyst Marion Milner. 

Link to the crowdfunding campaign for A Life of Own's Own about psychoanalyst Marion Milner:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/qr/BWdq6L4n?utm_campaign=sharemodal&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=shortlink

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training. Website: alexcurmitherapy.com

Check out The Thinking Mind  on Substack: https://substack.com/@thinkingmindpodcast

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

Speaker: Welcome back. Today film director and friend of the podcast, Tom Konik returns to discuss his upcoming film, A Life of One's Own. If you haven't heard it recently, Tom came on to discuss. Martin Scorsese Classic Taxi Driver a few weeks ago, a Life of One Zone is based on the life of psychoanalyst and writer Marian Milner. I'll confess I hadn't heard of Marian Milner before. Tom told me about her, but having learned a bit more, I think. She's a figure that people need to know more about, and that's why Tom is making this film marian Milner was born in the year 1900, making her 26 in the year 1926. That was when she started to explore her own life in some depth and what it is that made her happy. She had an non-dogmatic exploratory style. She was very much rejecting of the societal norms. At the time, and she ended up living a life that was full of [00:01:00] introspection, full of epiphanies, and she very much lived a life on her own terms, which is something I think we all aspire to do on some level today we explore key ideas that Milner wrote about, and these are ideas which inspired Tom. Including the practice of tracking one's happiness, her epiphany of wide versus our attention, the joy of purposelessness, and much more. We also discuss how modern advertising was influenced by psychoanalytic ideas,

the importance of searching for aliveness and vitality in your day-to-day life how to balance your ambitions versus the appreciation of the ordinary and the everyday,

and we also reflect on the current crisis in the film world and the importance of maintaining creative freedom. Tom is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to facilitate the editing and post-production of his film. There's a link to that in the description and you can also find cool [00:02:00] extras like merchandise from the film, and opportunities to attend special screenings of the film, including special screenings where psychoanalytic ideas will be discussed. so if this is the kind of film you want to see made, definitely check out that link. As always, thank you so much for listening, everyone.

And now here's today's conversation with . Tom Nik 

Alex: Thanks so much for joining me.

Tom: me. Th- you're welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Alex: very much for having me. Today, we're gonna be talking about the film you're working on, A Life of One's Own, all about the psychoanalyst Marion Milner, who I'm excited to learn a lot more about.

How did Marion enter your life?

Tom: life? Marion entered my life Marion entered my life a really long time ago like 12 or 13 years ago. And I was I was researching another film that I'm been working on for even longer about a boy who was a painter. And so I googled on painting 'cause I didn't know [00:03:00] anything about painting.

I mean, I love painting, but I don't know how to paint. So I just googled on painting, and then this title came up called "On Not Being Able to Paint." Which I thought was just so wickedly funny, and I was like- ... what is this book, "On Not Being Able to Paint"? So I ordered it, which is sort of Marion's, in a way, masterpiece.

And I ordered it, and I read it, and it's this incredible meditation on creativity and how do we open creativity, and it really becomes kind of almost mystical in its depth. And so I just started reading all of her books and became really obsessed with her, and I just knew I needed to do a film.

J- just something about reading her just opened things in me. There were, like, these visual responses, and at first I thought maybe I'd mix between the books or do a sort of straightforward documentary or a biopic. It went through all kind of thing, and eventually I sort of settled on "A Life of One's Own," which is her first book, because I think it had [00:04:00] the most robust pieces of narrative because it's based on her diary, and it's a kind of-- there's an innocence to it where she's discovering her very idiosyncratic language.

So I just became fascinated by this book, and I decided to zero in on this one book and then spent a decade trying to figure out how to make this sort of piece of nonfiction inner exploration into a film. Yeah. And that's how it happened.

Alex: happened. Not a lot of people know about Marion Milner. I hadn't heard of her before, you know, we talked. Why do you think she's not more well-known within the psychoanalytic community?

Tom: I mean, I have different theories about this. Yeah. I think she is slowly becoming more well known. A few really lovely books have come out about her in the last couple of years. She is starting to get recognition. But yeah, when I started researching her, when I came to the Psychoanalytic Institute to, to look at her [00:05:00] archives, I think no one had been there to look at them.

I was this weirdo, this one strange little man that spent months- literally no one was interested, and thankfully that's changed or is changing more and more. I think partly it was... it's because politically she was sort of fiercely independent. She didn't align herself with any of the big groups.

She took from Winnicott, she took from Masud Khan, she took from Melanie Klein. She... Anna Freud. She was in contact with all of them, but she refused to align herself with anyone. And I think that- That's a big no-no

Alex: Like what-- I've trained in psychotherapy for six years now. And it's like shockingly tribal- Yes ...how much the Gestaltists versus the psychoanalysts versus whoever, versus the cognitive behaviorists. But even then, within - psychoanalysis, there's so many different tribes, and I'm wondering like, isn't psychotherapy supposed to be about becoming more mature?

Tom: it that- But I don't know. Then why do you think it's so [00:06:00] tribal? Why do you think it's so tribal?

Alex: I guess I just think people are so tribal that even if you dedicate your whole career to trying to becoming more introspective and mature- ...it's still a trap you can fall into.

And I think people who go into psychology and psychotherapy are very passionate about it. It's a bit like the same way people are very passionate about their religion or their diet. People get really into, "Okay, this is the way I think about people, and this is how I think people can or should change or adapt or improve the quality of their lives."

So people are very attached to their beliefs. And they really don't like having them challenged. That's my best guess.

Tom: Do you think there's something about psychoanalysis or psycho- psychotherapy that is religious adjacent?

Alex: Yeah, for sure because I mean, you have to obviously point out that psychotherapy really started to emerge at a time when major religious institutions were declining.

[00:07:00] So we're talking about the beginning of the 20th century, essentially. So I don't think that's a coincidence. And also, psychotherapy is asking a lot of the same questions.

Tom: Like- 

Alex: it's not really asking metaphysical questions, fine. But that aside, it's asking questions: How should one conduct themselves? How should you live your life?

How should you make decisions? What are the really common ways decision-making goes awry? What are the common traps people fall into? So in terms of the practicalities, psychotherapy is asking a lot of the same questions at a time in history when they're not getting that same level of support that they might have gotten from their pastor at their local church.

So absolutely.

Tom: It's funny. I, I-- It's a slight tan-tangent from the question you asked me, which I'll come back to, but I think one of the things that started Marion off in a big way was World War

Alex: I.

Tom: She describes not in her books, but somewhere else, she describes this feeling of seeing injured soldiers back on the streets of London, and this [00:08:00] feeling that we've been told a story, they've been told a story, she's been told a story about the world and what the world should be like and what's important in it, and this really strong feeling in her that was a lie, that she needed...

So "A Life of One's Own" starts with this thing of where she's saying, " I don't want any mass-produced ideals. I don't want to be told what's important. I want to see whether I can find out for myself- Right ... what matters to me, and what's the kinda core of my life." And what's amazing about her, really it's su- it's astonishing 'cause she was 26 when she starts.

Alex: She was 26, and it was the year 1926- Exactly ...where she starts writing this book A Life of One's Own.

Tom: December 1926, she starts. And she describes this thing of she wants to find out what makes her happy, right? So w-we should probably explain, you know. So, so she starts out, and she has this feeling that she's [00:09:00] neither happy nor unhappy.

She's just removed from life. There's a sort of distance between her and the world. And she very quickly decides she doesn't wanna go to psychoanalysis. All of her friends say that really what she needs is to find a lover- Yeah ... which she rejects. She says it's not about finding a lover. And she's questioning all the ideals of this world around her that has just come out of World War I.

And so she decides to follow Montaigne and who was a big influence on her, and to observe her own experience. And she refuses to read books She refuses anyone's other point of view. She just wants to keep this journal and write down every day the things that made her happy. And what's in-incredible is within two or three weeks, she's already noticing that what makes her happy is so different to everything she's telling herself about what makes her happy.

It's much more elusive and mysterious and small and [00:10:00] undriven and unambitious.

Alex: the everyday things. Yeah,

Tom: Like sitting in her bath and feeling water on her skin- -or hearing a piano drifting in through the window, an open window, or looking at rooftops from a, you know, London kinda top floor of her office and suddenly getting a glimpse of this intense pleasure, and then it goes.

And she goes what brought it?" 

"

Tom: And why did it go? Like, why couldn't I stay there?" And so she just starts digging and digging into that. So to just tie into your original question, it's-- I think part of why she is less well-known is because she's so undogmatic. She doesn't offer any answers.

She just invites you to go on this super small and intricate and private journey into the minutiae of life and, and- -the workings of the mind, and she sort of-- It's almost like she's inviting you in a kinda whisper, kinda [00:11:00] going, "Do you want to come with me here?" And I think it splits people when they start reading her book.

You either go, "Oh my God, yes," "Tell me. I wanna know more." Or you go, "What is she on about?"

Alex: Yeah.

Tom: So it's-- I think she-- It's like a test. It's like a little test that she puts for the reader. 

Alex: Are you willing to put the external influences aside?

Tom: Yeah. And are you willing to survive frustration? One of the things about her book is that she's very honest about failing, so she has this great epiphany.

Something is amazing. She finds it, and then it's gone, and then she says, "And then for two years, I didn't find

Alex: anything." "And

Tom: didn't k- and I didn't know why it had gone." And so there's something kind of that can sort of frustrate a reader because it's so elliptical. But if you persevere with her, she's sort of saying, "I'm not here to give you any answers.

I'm-- But I might hold your hand as you ask questions," which I think is also the sign of a good therapist, which she became- -after this book.

Alex: Yeah. I mean, the impression [00:12:00] I got researching her is that eventually, you know, it took a long time, but she had a number of great answers, if you like, or epiphanies Through that process.

And a lot of epiphanies which correspond to lots of things which came about later, lots of things which neuroscience has kind of discovered, other spiritual traditions have discovered. She just had the courage to be like, "Society doesn't have the answers for me. A self-help book or psychoanalysis or a lover doesn't have the answers."

And before we go into, you know, her epiphanies a bit more, I would like to again comment on the setting this is happening in. So World War I, I think people don't talk about enough. We're obsessed with World War II. And World War II is very interesting for lots of reasons, and very important. But I feel like it's hard to under-emphasize how devastating World War I was for the society at the time.

For all intents and purposes, it was the apocalypse. Yeah. And it was like, this is what [00:13:00] happens if things go to their logical conclusion in terms of the European civilizations at the time. If they continue growing and expanding and existing in tension with each other, we get basically the apocalypse.

Tom: Yes.

Alex: And so it's no surprise that she would have this sense of "I don't think society has the answers particularly."

Tom: No. And it's also, you know, this sort of, it's that, and it's also commercials and mass media- Yeah

and the way that sort of really goes into their world and her being very suspicious of that, and that's only accelerated. I think also in relation to the war, if you read you know, like something like Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday"- ... and the way before World War I, there was really a sort of century of feeling like things were set.

Like they lived in a world which is sort of unthinkable to us, where they felt like, "Yeah, this is-- These are the empires, this is the sort of thing, and this is how we're gonna live [00:14:00] our lives." And then suddenly this earthquake happens, and this enor- these enormous cracks start appearing under their feet, and everyone starts asking q-questions.

And then like you said, you know, 

Alex: these

Tom: ideas like psychoanalysis and socialism, and they just start flooding. And Eastern ideas, like suddenly people are coming back from India talking about meditation, talking about Buddhism, talking about all kinds of things that they just didn't talk about before.

And all of that is very much in Marion's mind when she's- ... going through this journey, this thing of going, " I've been taught that life was thus, and now I'm living in a world where it's not like that, and I need to find my way through it, because no one is going to help me, because the answers they're giving me don't feel true."

Alex: Right.

And you also mentioned this is the time where mass advertising starts, mass media, and I'm [00:15:00] wondering if you've watched the documentary Century of Con-- Century of Self- Adam Curtis ... by Adam Curtis. Exactly.

Tom: That's exactly it.

Alex: So there's-- So strangely enough, there's also a connection between psychoana- psychoanalysis and the start of mass advertising in that the nephew by marriage of Sigmund Freud is this guy, Edward Bernays, and it's worth doing a deep dive on who Edward Bernays was.

He's essentially the father of modern marketing, advertising, PR, and this man uses psychoanalytic ideas that Freud came up with to come up with the kinds of modern advertisements we see today. So, so before that, the way you would market something... I mean, logically, the way you would try and market a product is by saying, "Oh, this is what it can do.

These are the pros, these are the cons. You should buy this car because it drives this fast or seats this many people." Whereas using Freud's ideas, it's no, you have to appeal to our more basic instincts. You have to [00:16:00] appeal to the id, if you like. And so the reason why we have now car advertisements where you have cars with horses running next to them or beautiful women or very emotional language is because of Edward Bernays and because of Freud.

So is-- you have to tap into someone's unconscious desires, basically.

Tom: There's that great scene in it where they, where he talks about-- Did-didn't he, Bernays, about cigarettes? Yes. And because they had only been selling cigarettes to men before, and he said to them, "No, you should sell cigarettes to women because of penis envy or whatever." Like some kind of- Yeah

extension of Freud. A-and so suddenly they start marketing-

Alex: torches. Yes. That's how they were Yeah.

Tom: probably it. Yeah.

Alex: Can you imagine?

Tom: Which is i-i-i-- Yeah. It's a kind of... Maybe it's the sort of sinister side of psychoanalysis or what that level of understanding of the workings of our unconscious does because it gives people tools to manipulate that, which again, w-now we just live in a sort of hyped up version of that.

And I think that's partly why [00:17:00] Marion is slowly becoming more acknowledged or people more and more people are starting to come to her because I think there's something about the, I mean, there's so many things about her, but there's something about her courage and her insistence on going, "No, I want to find my own answer."

I want to find my own answer." For what is important to me in my own life. And of course she's faced with all kinds of barriers to, to, to finding that answer 'cause these answers are so elusive. Like, how can we d- separate between ideas that have been placed in us, between conceptions that have been given to us, to things that we really wish for, or to things that we withhold from ourselves because of fear?

And so that really becomes her journey, certainly in this first book of asking what... H-how do I know what makes me happy?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah.

Tom: how-

Alex: What do you think are some of the key [00:18:00] like, epiphanies she had along the way in writing this book?

Tom: book? I mean, there's so many epiphanies. She comes up with her own terminology.

Again, because she refuses to read other people's books, sometimes she comes up with her own terms for things that other people were thinking about and named differently, and then later in her life she starts linking these things. But what's so fun is that, you know, she c- she can talk about, you know, butterfly thoughts.

You know, what are these thoughts that suddenly come fluttering through your mind and why do they, you know... or back of mind thoughts or the Netherland, which you could say is the unconscious, I think probably her, maybe her biggest epiphany she notices that there is an element of relaxation to all of these moments.

So these moments come, like I said, you know, the bath or the sound of a piano or... And she notices first that each of them involves some kind of relaxation, some kind of physical relaxation as if something is softening in her. And she keeps trying to go deeper and deeper into [00:19:00] this relaxation, into this softening.

 But then she always finds that at the edge of that moment is a panic and a clinging. So she can sort of soften into something and then suddenly ... something tightens, and there's a real panic of something. And she goes further and further into it and the biggest moment that is a real kind of pivot is she goes on holiday with her husband to Germany, to the Black Forest, and it's raining.

And he had very bad asthma, and he's very sick, and so they're stuck in this hotel room for three days where it's just raining outside, and she's miserable, and she hates him, and she hates herself for hating him, and she's just in a loop of these kind of chattering thoughts, what she calls, you know, these kind of like constant thing.

And then one morning the sun comes out And she can go for a walk on her own. And she goes into the Black Forest, and she finds this little cafe, and she [00:20:00] sits in a cafe drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, looking out at the scenery.

Alex: That's the most European thing I've ever heard.

Tom: It's very central. She is very European as well- Yeah ...which is kind of interesting 'cause she's o- she's so English, and yet on some level- Yeah ...she's deeply European.

But she describes this ease, and she suddenly comes up with this thing which is this de- delineation between wide attention and narrow attention. And to her, narrow attention is about breaking the world up and naming things. And it's a perfunctory way of living, but it's sort of joyless. It's pleasureless.

It's da, get things done. You know, we've, we all know what that... And it's really useful, and it's really needed to get through life, but it withholds us from something that's very precious. And in this moment, she suddenly feels this widening as if her senses just widen, [00:21:00] and she can feel and hear and s- and there's not a line between her and the world.

She doesn't need to name things. She doesn't need to have

Alex: doesn't need to apply a concept- No ... to something. No

Tom: purposefulness. It's just happening. And suddenly everything is transformed. And she goes back to the hotel room, and they eat soup on the bed and play chess into the night, and the whole experience is transformed.

And from that point on, she really starts digging deeper into this tension between wide attention and narrow attention and why if narrow attention is so pleasurable, why can she not be there more often? How can she im-

Alex: if wide attention is so pleasurable. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom: You know, and what keeps her from being in that place?

But then she also wonders about the purposeness of narrow attention and the dialogue between these two things. So I would say that's probably one of the kinda major things. And eventually she connects it to bisexuality to what she calls [00:22:00] the feminine and masculine elements in our consciousness.

But like you said, you know, McGilchrist now writes about the hemispheres. Right. And it's basically the same idea.

Alex: That's what I was gonna mention. Yeah. So for, yeah, for those of you who don't know, the book "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist is all about this. We had him on the podcast a couple of years ago, and he makes this he makes this delineation between narrow attention a-and wide attention, and that narrow attention is generally associated with the left hemisphere, and it's about goal orientation.

It's like a tool. It's like an instrument. You use this narrow attention to get things done, like I need to pick up a cup, or I need to pass an exam, or I need to do something. And the right hemisphere is more associated with this broad attention, which is thinking about things in the big picture What does this all mean in a kind of grander sense?

And he feels that as a culture, we have... the th- one of the points he makes in the book is, as a culture, we have [00:23:00] moved much more towards a left hemisphere way of thinking in that we're too goal-orientated the expense of our happiness in a lot of ways. It's kind of, the left hemisphere views the world in a way which is quite deadening- Yes ...in its goal orientation.

Yes. And by sitting back, trying to take in the big picture, and I guess the other important ingredient which Marion mentions is not having an attachment to outcome, like not wanting anything. That can create a much greater sense of like peace, equanimity.

Tom: Yeah. And I think again, you know, she experiments all through the book, and in a way all through her writing in general with purpo-purposelessness. And I think one of the things that was a big epiphany for me in working about, on the film, again, like I said, I've been working on for so long is when you first read her, certainly I felt that way you can sort of feel like she's an oracle.

If you really fall for her, you can sort of go, "Oh my God, this woman just knows everything." And I know [00:24:00] nothing." And then there was a moment in rereading the books where I suddenly realized, "No, she's doing this because it's hard." The reason why she has to invest so much energy in this research is because she can tell that there's something that's eluding her all of the time, 

Alex: time

Tom: and she's trying to use her incredible mind to find a way out of a sort of prison- of the hemispheres.

You know, this narrow, joyless, perfunctory way of living. And she can tell that there's something beyond that. And it comes in glimpses, and she's not content in saying, "Okay, it just comes and goes at will." She goes, "No. I wonder if there's a way that I could be there more." And again, for her, she also connected to this thing of feminine and masculine in the sense of like masculine as in a masculine narrative of life, of achieving and- Control ...control and naming which she connects to also [00:25:00] science and scientific thing, this thing of the sort of naming of things.

And at first in her journey, where, you know, it's such a long journey, at first she sort of becomes quite, Judgmental of that. But actually by the end of the book she is-- becomes aw-aware or she articulates for herself that it's a constant friction and it's a constant dialogue between these two things, and that if you're in an imbalance, if you're too leaning to one side, you're missing something, and if you're too leaning...

So, you know- So

Alex: yeah, I think you talked about

Tom: w-what

Alex: read when reading about your film is that she landed at this almost forced dichotomy, one where she was before th-this experiment, self-consciousness, trapped in thought, trying to control everything, versus what she leant into more when she was writing this book.

Impulsivity, going with your intuition, going with how you're feeling in the moment, and then where does she go from there?

Tom: there? That's a really good question. I think one of the things that's interesting [00:26:00] about her is that she was an actual person and she had lim- she had limits, you know. And I think one of the things that we really thought about a lot while we were filming the film and making the film was the moments where Marion m-reaches her own limits.

And I think her own limits... in the journey of this book particularly you really feel how she finds these moments of pleasure alone, and then she finds them in relation to art, and then she finds them in relation to nature, and then she starts trying to implement them in relation to other people, and it's really hard.

The

Alex: of all challenges. The

Tom: of all. And I don't know if she fully succeeds. She sort of finds-- 'cause she's so brilliant, she sort of finds her way through it to her point. But I think maybe the thing that she found was that she needed to be alone a lot. I think maybe that was one of the answers that she found, because really, [00:27:00] in her books after that, subsequently, she never writes about the struggle to be with other people anymore.

The books are all pretty solitary and talking to her grandson, talking to her friends. She f- maybe she found a sort of peace with the fact that a part of her needed to be solitary which I'm still in dialogue with. Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that but it's... m-maybe that's a part of it.

Alex: I mean, I think there's certainly a wisdom in recognizing that you have a nature and it's good to have a think about how you want your life to be in light of that nature. So if you're really introverted, yeah, it makes sense to spend a lot of time alone.

At the same time, there's that intention with should you be ex- You know, 'cause that advice can be misinterpreted as you should never grow.

Tom: And

Alex: And th-that's a tough thing to rec- Those two things are tough to reconcile. So there's something about [00:28:00] designing your life and taking instruction from your nature, but also where are your learning edges and where is it that you could expand your capabilities or expand your ability to be, like, in harmony with aspects of your life that you might have been in tension with before.

I'd be curious to read more about Marion's work myself so I could get a better picture of that.

Tom: I think it's-- I think, again, one of the things that I, I w-was interested in she... It's quite funny that we're both men and we're talking about her, and that I'm a man and I made a film about her, because I think one of the things was that she really disliked being told what to do by men.

It's a very kind of banal thing, but-

Alex: But in 1926, it's a big deal.

Tom: It's a big deal, and there were a lot of expectation about what a woman should be like and I think she was a genius, and I think she was very loyal to her genius. And so things that came [00:29:00] in the way of that had to be eventually eliminated, and that also included husbands, children- Yeah

you know, eventually. And it made her a complex woman to be around, but it's what she needed to be to flourish in this place of her mind, you know? And, and-

Alex: She was the kind of genius you don't hear about much, 'cause we talk-- I guess when we talk about geniuses in the modern day, we often talk about geniuses at science or genius software developers or tech people.

She's an introspective genius, so she's a genius at looking at her own psyche and gleaning lessons from it that can be useful for other people, and I think Jung was probably the same way, other psychoanalysts. And it's a very unglamorous, unsexy form of genius. That's like the contemplative genius.

Yeah,

Tom: a hundred percent. And, and-- But again, that's the tension that she describes between, you know... In order to write down [00:30:00] your experiences, you need to be in touch with The narrow. You need to name things. And in order to have something to describe, you have to have the experience, so you have to go into the wider tension.

And I think by the end of this book, the pl- the thing that she's super, super interested is in this movement between narrow and wide, between naming and un-naming, between experiencing and describing, and living inside that tension. That it's not a-- it's not-- it doesn't need to be a peaceful place.

It doesn't need to be... I mean, it can be peaceful at points, but it can also be a dialogue, an internal dialogue that at points can be quite vehement and full of friction. But that in fact that inner friction is also aliveness. Yeah. That it doesn't need to be feared or quenched.

Alex: I think it's just too easy to go to either extreme.

So some people really remain in the left hemisphere world, if you like, and they're like, "I'm gonna..." I guess one word you could use to describe them is optimizers. They're optimizing for [00:31:00] everything. You see a lot of that on podcasts . 10 best lessons to

Tom: Oh, and h- how, like how to optimize.

How

Alex: to optimize everything about your life. So there's that camp, and I, you know, there's lots of things I love about that camp. And then there's the camp of the spiritual optimizers who are like, " I'm gonna go meditate in an ashram for 20 years, and I'm not gonna engage with the world." And I'm not sure I'm fully on board with that either, as much as I'm a fan of introspection.

Tom: I'm

Alex: much more of a fan of sitting with that tension, going between the introspection and the experience and the more conceptual world, 

Tom: i'm a sucker for the conceptual.

Alex: Okay. Yeah.

Tom: Yeah. I mean, I hate the real world. And that's the irony of making films, because in order to make films, you need to raise money, and you need to convince people to join you.

Film is such a tangible thing, and it, it-- you really need to be in the real world. And I think that's partly why I make films. I think 'cause I [00:32:00] know that,

Alex: ' Cause it keeps you in touch with the real

Tom: Yeah, in a way that really I hate. I just... If I could just be left alone to think ...my whole life.

Yeah. It's funny, even now I'm editing the film, and I found myself daydreaming the other night just lying in bed, and I was, like, editing in my mind. I was moving shots around in my mind, and I thought, "If only editing could be this." If only I didn't need to be in touch with software and move my fingers to actually move things, and I could just move the film in my mind.

Alex: Wait until you see what happens with agentic AI . Your dream might become a

Tom: It might. But I think then I'd miss because actually there's something about You know, again, it's a very Ma-M-M-Marian term. I-I... You know, she-- There's one point she talks about the wisdom of our fingers. There are there are different types of wisdom in us and one of her great kind of thing is, is she-- There's a great scene in the book, which we've made into a scene in the [00:33:00] film, where she talks about darning socks, and she had just tried to learn to play ping pong.

Someone had taught her to play and she's so tense, and she hits the ball and she keeps missing it, and she gets angry with herself and whoever she's playing with, she doesn't say who, says just rela- loosen your, Your wrist ... your wrist. Just loosen your wrist and just don't think about it.

Just imagine the ball, you know, flying." And so she does it, and suddenly she finds this flow, this rhythm of hitting the thing. And so the next day or a week after or something she has to darn socks, which is a task she hates. She hates the, you know, darning socks. She hates anything to do with like home-homeliness.

And she decides to try and do the same thing that she did with the ping pong bat, with the needle and thread. And she basically decides to disconnect her mind from her hand and to just let her hand move. And suddenly she finds this pleasure in the movement of the hand, and she goes deeper into this pleasure of just moving your hand.

Allowing. Allowing. [00:34:00] And this task that she used to hate suddenly becomes deeply pleasurable. And anyone who enjoys washing dishes, like I don't like dishwashers. I love-- 'cause I think I like the warm water, I like the circular motion, and these little moments that have a kind of pleasure that's not intellectual, it's just a sensation.

And she starts finding these things in, in, in-- even in places that she hates. And then she coins this phrase where she says, you know, "Perhaps fingers, and hands, and eyes have a wisdom of their own that- ... doesn't need me to tell them what to look at or what to do. They just know how to do it, and all I need is to learn how to not be in the way."

Right. To stop forcing thoughts on things.

Alex: Absolutely, and I think there's a lot you can learn from that in terms of creativity as well. What ha-has [00:35:00] reading about Marion's work, has that influenced how you approach creativity and creative work?

Tom: Everything I mean, she's changed my life. She's become interwoven into everything I do.

If it's in things like tools like stream of consciousness, which have become s- really central to the way I work and create films to something we mentioned before we started, this thing of being present that I'm less interested-- I prepare enough now to know that I feel secure enough to be present in the moment- rather than overpreparing in a way that suffocates the moment. Which I've always been interested in 'cause I was drawn to her for a reason. But a kind of deep listening and a free-floating attention when I'm working to unexpected stimuli from different places that suddenly affect me or that I feel in my body which was always there, but she kinda gave me a a terminology.

And then things like, for example, in another book of [00:36:00] hers, I don't know if this is interesting, but like in another book of hers she has this phrase she calls memory beads. And basically she's wondering, why is it that whenever she goes on holiday, the most precious moment is not the moment that she expected?

Yeah. So it's like the walking down a mountain after seeing the place that she so wanted to see suddenly becomes the most precious memory, and she sort of starts wondering, why is it that these kind of off the beaten track memories stay with you? And she calls them memory beads. And so when I work with actors now, I ask them to write memory beads for their characters.

I ask them to write insignificant memories that hold a glow. They have a golden glow to them. But they're not about narrative. They're not about getting anywhere. They're not about any kind of purposefulness or big drama in the character's life. They might be a moment where the character dances with their [00:37:00] father, you know- or sits in silence with someone, or... and then we try and create these, and when we create them, suddenly all these hidden threads start appearing of meaning, of unexpected

Alex: They emerge.

Tom: emerge. And all of that is pure Milner. A person I've never met has sort of woven themselves into my life. Yeah.

Alex: I mean, for

me I resonate a lot with that because for me anything creative I try and do is all about allowing. And I think the trap people fall into when they try and do something creative for the first time, like they want to write for the first time or make a podcast or what have you, is they try too hard.

They're like, "I wanna make something with my mi- I'm gonna engineer my mind as a tool to make something." And immediately you're like, "This is falling short of my grand expectations "of 

What I was gonna produce." And then you become disheartened, then you stop. Whereas actually for me, the work of creating is just trying.

[00:38:00] So you have to sit down, and you have to be like, "This is the time I've allocated, and I'm gonna try, and I'm going to," rather than... Sorry. "Rather than try, I'm going to allow. I'm going to open a window of opportunity for my brain and see what comes out of it." So in terms of writing, that looks like opening a document and typing and letting it be bad.

It can be bad. It probably will be bad. And you continue that process, and then you go back later, and then later, maybe with a more left hemisphere- Mm ...point of view, you can say, "Okay, this is what I like. This is what I don't like." And then it's r-repeating that process over and over again. But unless you have the courage to let go, you're not gonna be able to reliably like, produce anything of, of substance.

It's gonna be exhausting. You're always going to be f- I guess, facing the friction of your mind-

Yeah ...in some sense. And the same is with podcasting. So with podcasting, you quickly learn you have to prepare for a conversation. Like I prep- I have notes.

Tom: pre-

Alex: But I didn't know I was gonna talk about most of the things we talked about.

I [00:39:00] didn't know we were going to talk about World War I. Mm. I'm, i'm elaborating on this point for listeners 'cause I know I have quite a few listeners who want to start a podcast, so- ... 

Mm you prepare before, and maybe like you refer to your notes a bit, but you just have to open your mouth and see what comes out.

And some of it's gonna be dumb. And that's all right. That's okay. But

Tom: But it's funny I'm really conscious as we're talking, as you're speaking and I'm listening to you, I'm really conscious that I'm also pretending to listen to you. It's a, it's, it-- and that's something that's true when you're making a film, and it's definitely connected to Milner.

You know, one of the things that's most difficult when you're acting in a film or when you're making a film in general, but certainly when you're acting in a film, is that you've got this machine staring at you, and you've got all these people, and yet you have to trick your mind into being completely inside the thing that you're doing.

Like you just pressed the little key, and I immediately went, "What's happened? Is the volume too low?" Ba-da-da. And as I'm speaking I'm mindful that for example, if we used a Milner-esque thing, I'm conscious that I [00:40:00] have a little bit of tension here, so I'm- I'm relaxed, and I am listening to you, and I am trying to be in a kind of flu- free flow state.

But somewhere in my mind, there's something that's going, "People are gonna listen to this, so you better be 

Alex: You better try. 

Tom: try. "You better be interesting." And in a way, what you're saying is true. The most exciting part of it for me, and for her, I think is the moment when you can really let go of that and just be inside your experience.

And then come back which again is super interesting 'cause when you look at her notebooks which was a big inspiration for how I made the film or how I'm making the film, all of her notebooks are full of layers upon layers of writing in different pens. So she would write the journal, and that would be the most straightforward or honest un-self-conscious attempt to describe.

And then she would write in another colored pen on top of that, comments on the [00:41:00] thing, and then she would write in another colored pen on top of that. And then sometimes it would go up to four or five layers of a kind of archeology of thought, where there's the first experience, which is the raw material, and then something in her looking at that in another color, and then another layer of her looking at that.

And you have these sort of indecipherable pages, only she could probably work out the kind of levels of it, of observing the experience from different directions. And I think that's so interesting, this thing of just do it first and then see what it does to you. Another great thing that she-- I really took from her is misquoting things.

Mm. Her books are full of misquotes. Oh. And then the editors would always say to her but that's... You-- We need to fix the quote because it's not the correct quote." And she'd say, "No, but that's how I needed to remember it."

Alex: That was her perception. That was the perception that mattered to me of

that.

quote. 

Tom: That's what was useful to me at that point. [00:42:00] Maybe the tension or the gap between these two is interesting, but, but- I don't need the real quote. The real quote is for somebody else. I need the quote as I remembered it.

Alex: It would've been cool to have both quotes, the real quote and this is the meaning I

Tom: I took from it.

I'm pretty sure in some of the new editions it's like that. The, the-- In the footnotes you sort of see the difference between them. But... And similarly, like she would have a... She would do this thing where when she was writing, and sometimes she would just look at her bookcase and just let her finger go along the bookcase, and then open a book, and then just open it at a random place, and just see where her eyes took her.

And sometimes it was nothing, and sometimes suddenly something would pop up, and she'd be like, "Oh, that's so interesting. That's exactly what I'm thinking about." So sh-she was constantly challenging herself. You know, she did it with her painting. She was a painter, and she would paint a painting.

She'd hang it on the walls of her apartment, and then she'd talk to people about it. Guests would come, and they would have conversations about the [00:43:00] painting, and then maybe 10 weeks later or six months later, she would cut the p-painting up-

Alex: p-painting up-

Tom: And rearrange it and create a collage. And some of the paintings went through this process of re-collaging three or four times.

And I don't even think she was preoccupied with like, reaching an end goal of the collage ending. I think she just liked assembling and disassembling and 

Alex: like-

The act itself.

Tom: think so, yeah. I think so. I don't know. I didn't get to talk to her about it, but I think so. 

Alex: I mean,

the wonderful thing about creativity is it's like this high risk, high reward strategy. By high risk, I mean it's inconsistent.

If you do creative work, sometimes you produce something amazing. Most of the time you probably won't. And so most people are put off from living creatively because it's seen as too unreliable. Why should I live in a creative way when I can just take in influences from other people and do what other people do, and do these tried and tested strategies?

The problem with that is, A, you're not [00:44:00] always seeing the world through your own eyes, 'cause the wonderful thing about creativity is you get to learn about yourself and start to develop your own-- to cultivate your own perspective. But also, it's quite deadening. And you're not-- You're obviously not-- By definition, you're not innovating.

Mm. If you do creative work right, by which I mean do it consistently over a long period of time, I tend to be op-quite optimistic about what people- ...can do. 'Cause on a given day, if you cr-if you spend an hour or two trying to create, you probably won't produce much. But if you do an hour or two every day for 10 years, you know, wonderful things can happen.

Tom: I think it's something about optimism, weirdly. Yeah. What you just said about optimising optimism about life and optim-- There's something about doing your work 

Alex: which 

Tom: fills one with optimism for some reason. Like I was friends with another great writer who had a big influence on me and the thing I got from him, or one of the things I got from him, was he said to me, "Just make sure that you write a sentence that you like each day.

Don't worry about a [00:45:00] book or a film or funding or... If you can finish each day and go, 'That was a nice sentence- Mm. -I -i like that sentence,' you've done something really worthwhile." And like you said, if you keep collecting sentences that you like over two years, maybe you'll end up with a book that you like.

Like- Yeah. And I think with Marion, the thing that-- One of the ideas that she becomes really interested in, in, in the period that I'm dealing with is Keats' notion of negative capability, which is Keats says that the key to creativity is the ability to remain in unknown, that it fills us with dread.

Alex: Yeah. Because we-we're suddenly f- afraid. We're suddenly... Our perception of ourselves is shaken, and if we can tolerate that space, it's a big step towards creativity. And she then elaborates on that with another phrase that she calls the [00:46:00] answering activity. So for her, she tries to allow herself to feel empty, to not know to meet this kind of terrifying void of saying, "I hear nothing inside myself.

Tom: I'm looking inwards, and there's nothing there," which is often the place where we want to pull something off the shelf and go- Right.

Alex: Tell me the 10 steps to- Yeah ... living my life.

Exactly.

Tom: Or the reference or the

copy. Or listen my podcast. But she says, "No, stay in that place. Stay in the unknown." And sometimes nothing will come back.

Sometimes you'll stay in the unknown for a long time, and you won't get what you're looking for. It's not... Again, she's so anti-dogmatic. It's not like she's saying, "If you stay here, you will find it." She's "No, stay in it, and sometimes nothing will come, and it will be really hard. But sometimes something will come," and that's what she calls the answering activity, which is what she calls the I not I.

The voice that comes from within that [00:47:00] is of me but is not me. It's a surprising call from within and when you get that call, it's so thrilling. Yeah. But you have to be brave enough.

Alex: You have to ask the question.

Tom: Yeah. And you have to tolerate not knowing for a while. 

Alex: Yeah.

A lot of this even applies to the work I do in terms of therapy and coaching, in that a lot of people, again, going on this theme of looking to the external for answers, a lot of people come to therapy or for coaching because they feel they need the answer from the therapist or the coach.

And a lot-- You know, obviously, in that role, I probably will provide some psychoeducation, some guide. "Okay, this is a way you could think about how your mind works," which is helpful. But a lot of the work is also, I'm just gonna direct your mind in a way that you're not used to directing it, and your mind is gonna produce answers that you didn't know were there.

So a lot of time I'll have clients go through exercises of just really simple [00:48:00] stuff. Okay, write down a little bit about what your problem is and what you're feeling and the different emotions. Don't try and control it. Just describe it. And then something really simple like, if you were your own friend, , how would you counsel yourself in this moment?

What advice would you give yourself? And they'll come up with 10 amazing

answers,

It reminds me almost of, how people use ChatGPT. So, people don't realize the limitation with ChatGPT isn't ChatGPT now. It's the questions that you ask it. That's the limiting factor.

But guess what? The same is also true of your own mind. Your mind is capable of producing really good answers. Again, not all the time. There will be times where you're stuck, and you might remain there for a while. But a lot of the time, if you can dare to ask yourself some of the right questions, you'd be shocked at what can emerge.

Tom: I know. I don't know. It's funny maybe it's an expression of my own stuckness, but 

Alex: but 

Tom: really know the stuck moment. Like, when you were describing it now, I thought of a few moments in my life where I was able either to find that other [00:49:00] voice or it was offered to me by therapists, particularly.

I suddenly thought of a therapist I had when I was 19 who, who literally said to me, " You're looking at the world through very dark glasses, and I just want to see what it's like to take them off." And I remember I didn't believe him, and I said, you know, "No, this is reality. This is reality. I know that it is."

And he said think about me as the wisest man who has ever lived, because I've been doing this for a long time, and I've seen many patients, and I know a lot about their lives. So it's as if I've lived 6,000 lives, and I'm telling you that what you're seeing is not reality. And so can we see what it's like to take these dark glasses off?"

And it's funny because that's a phrase that I still think about a million years after because They're still there. Yeah. And I still have to go, "Tom, take the dark glasses off." And yeah, it's one of 

Alex: It's one, yeah, it's one of the cr-crucial lessons I [00:50:00] talk about a lot, which is you, we have a much narrower... We think we're seeing reality.

We take it for granted, but we're see- we're seeing a perception of reality, and that perception the glasses, if you like, is colored by o-our past, our identity, our beliefs, our expectations, our insecurities, also like our triumphs, our skills, our talents. 

Tom: Yeah.

Alex: And the more you can become aware it's not like you want to get rid of having a lens, but at least be aware that there's a lens.

Tom: Yeah. What, again, not to tie it back to Milner too forcefully, but I think you asked me earlier, you know, one-- I think one of the biggest epiphanies that she has in the context of the book that, that I'm looking at is this panic that comes. So there's pleasure, and then there's panic, and the panic is always about being engulfed.

The panic is about being obliterated by the outside. It's as if the two things can't [00:51:00] exist. I either am secure in some kind of very- 

Alex: Like ego? ... 

Tom: ego. Exactly. That is literally the phrase she uses, you know. I'm either secure in some kind of self-conscious, self-regulating ego-dri- ego in the psychological sense, not necessarily ego, although it does have that as well, ego kind of driven, or I let go, but then I'm in danger of being obliterated- Yeah

and disappearing.

Alex: And is that the kind of the same dread you're, th-f-f-- in your mind, is that the same dread we were talking about earlier in the creative process of

What's gonna happen here if I just put something out there?

Tom: That's a good question. I don't know. I th- 

Alex: could to make it more grounded, that's kind of how I feel if I'm sitting down to, let's say, f- write something.

Tom: I'm feeling that resistance. I don't think I suffer from writer's block, but you get that resistance, 

and when I 

Alex: lean into that resistance, it feels something like, what if what [00:52:00] I produce is gonna be shit? Yeah. And then what does that say about me, in other words, my ego and the story I'm telling myself- Yeah

if that's the case.

Tom: I think that's definitely true. I think f- but I think for her or maybe the place where I relate to her plight or the thing that I've invented about her plight, again, because I'm not-- I can't meet her to ask her. 

I 

think some of us question our own existence on some deep level.

We, we wonder if we're really here If we're really alive, if we really exist, or if we're just an extension of other people's- Mm. -dreams and fantasies and wishes. And I think on some level, Marian is always searching for that early aliveness that is certain of its own existence. And because it's not there, she has to work so hard to try and find that place, and I think that's why these moments of contact are so, enlivening- -but also so [00:53:00] terrifying because it's literally like-- It's not even on the level of "Oh, I'll be judged, or I will..." It's, it is that as well, but eventually, when she really digs deeper and deeper into it, it's like true aliveness happens for her, and she says it towards the end of the book. True aliveness happens when you let go, and you let life engulf you.

Alex: Right. 

Tom: But it's also the moment where you risk being annihilated, and if you don't accept that risk, if you don't allow love to overwhelm you or the death to overwhelym-- You know what I mean? The realities of life to overwhelm you, you're never gonna be really alive, she says to herself.

Alex: Yeah. So I, I'm actually thinking now of ego death that people get with psychedelics.

Sounds like that to me.

Tom: Can you tell me more? I'm really interested in that.

Alex: that. O-often when people take psychedelics, like psychedelics are this catalyst for a transcendental experience. So if you want to have a transcendental experience, [00:54:00] you can do like what Marion Milner did and write about yourself for very long stretches of time.

You can take up a meditation practice, or you could take five 

Tom: grams 

Alex: mushroom of

Tom: mushrooms. 

Alex: To 

be clear, I am a medical professional. I am not recommending anyone do this, but this is factually what would happen. And so,

it's this fast track, it's this catalyst, and I think when a lot of people take-- I don't know if you have any experience with psychedelics, but w- often when people take a high dose, they experience, yes, aliveness, vitality, seeing the world as though they were a newborn child.

In other words, like pre-conceptual, just experiencing. They're not looking at an apple. There is just like 

Tom: appleness- ...

Alex: in

their 

Tom: field of vision. Mm-hmm. 

Alex: Wow. 

And some people

love it and take to it like a duck to water, but in other people, it's just terrifying because it seems to be doing something in the brain where it really disrupts the sense of who we are, this i-illusion of self, if you like, or this ego.

And a lot of people really have [00:55:00] bad trips because they have that experience, and then they fight against it, and it's the resistance to that which causes like a bad trip.

Tom: So that is definitely like one of the things again as Milner goes on her journey is, you know, she becomes fascinated in the dogness of the dog. This is-- These are literally phrases from the book, you know. She sh-to see the sidewalk not as a perfunctory thing, but as a, as an existing thing.

To look at an apple and see its appleness. So it-- Yeah, all that kind of ego death or e-ego disillusion is something that she's prodding herself- Mm-hmm ...to, to do. Like you say, again, in a tradition that Jung does as well. Like to go, but she does it without hallucinogenics. Right. And maybe later in life she did.

I don't have details of that. But she's definitely pushing herself to that place, and she finds it deeply rewarding and utterly

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Did she become interested in Eastern thinking at some point 

Tom: later?

[00:56:00] E-e-even in this period, like again, going through her archives, she doesn't write about it very much, but looking at her notebooks and stuff, there's a lot of yoga, there's a lot of meditation.

She's super, super interested in these ideas. She doesn't write them... She writes a bit about-- Like again, it's funny, something that I've incorporated into my own, like when I teach certainly, like she writes about this wonderful relaxation exercise that she sort of steals from somewhere, where she tries to invite every single body part.

She scans her body, and she invites every single body part to soften and relax. And then she imagines that she draws air in, and her body becomes like a balloon, and it inflates, and there's a lot of air inside the thing, and then she lets it out, and the balloon shrinks back into the-- into its normal size, and then she does 

it again.

And then she imagines that she's a cat, and she tries to [00:57:00] move her spine like a cat. And all of these things are inspired by- ...that kind of world. But as ever with her, she sort of tinkers with it and makes it her own, 

Alex: it's not for a results.

Tom: She is result-orientated, but she knows that's not gonna bring her the results she lo- she wants.

Yeah. And so she has to constantly put gatekeepers in place to go... 

Alex: You know, 

Tom: there's a great moment where she's lying on the beach. It happens a few times in the book. She's lying on a beach, and then there's another one where she's on a boat and she's propelled forward by thoughts, and then she develops this mantra, you know, "I want nothing."

And she just repeats it, "I want nothing." And then it becomes more elaborate. She says, "I want nothing. 

Something I 

think nothing, I am nothing." And then later in her life, she questions that mantra as a kind of negation of her own desire. But at that moment, it just helps her slow down- ... and stop this feverish mind.

The chase. 

Alex: The 

chase.

This chase. [00:58:00] for some manipulation of conscious 

Tom: experience. Yeah.

But also this voice in her that says "I need to read more books. I need to-- I don't know enough. I don't know." You know, and again, like, when you think about her brother won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. He was, like, a ge- you know, another genius.

Her sister, her ol- her mid- the middle sister, Winnie, was, you know, the head of the Architecture Association in England. So these 

Alex: are

Her father was a stockbroker, I 

Tom: think.

Her father was a... this is where it gets a bit- ... complicated. I mean, we can talk about her family life, but there is something fascinating that these three kids become extraordinarily ambitious people, 

and 

she's the youngest and she has this sort of dialogue with ambition.

She is deeply ambitious, but she's also very suspicious of it and wants to do something else. And again, I think one of the things that I've taken from Milner, which I think she shared with Winnicott in some ways and in other ways she differs from him, but she really l-loves [00:59:00] ordinariness.

She's really preoccupied with the magic of ordinariness and how can we give ourselves permission to be ordinary in the most wonderful way.

Alex: And I feel like that's a lesson for 2026 more than- ...just as much as 1926.

Tom: Again, maybe that's why people are

Alex: starting- More than 1926. Yeah. Maybe that's why people are starting to read her more and, l- you know, because she is sort of fascinated by ordinariness.

Tom: You know, the jam on the toast, and how can I get to a place where I really enjoy it? Not in a kind of self-conscious, self-congratulat-congratulatory term, but this pleasure in living that is, is really inches away from us all of the time, and yet we are 

Alex: to it. 

Tom: Yeah. and she's constantly asking: How do we pass that threshold to actua- into actually being 

here?

Alex: Yeah. It's like one of the lessons you learn if you start meditation, if, you know, if it works for you, is we're 

always grasping for [01:00:00] happiness, and it's like we're sitting on a safe which has a million dollars in it, and we just don't have the combination.

Yes.

And 

the weird irony is if you just stop chasing

experience, if you stop chasing happiness, not always but often emerges, or definitely a sense of peace c-can quite reliably emerge.

Tom: emerge. A hundred percent. And it's funny because I'm in a dialogue, you know, with her about this 

because of my own search and struggles with happiness and my own ambivalence about happiness. But I 

can feel how... You 

know, I can sit here with you or we're sitting here together now and I can worry about whether this is going well or if it's interesting or, you know.

Or I can just enjoy the fact that we have this time together- 

Alex: ...To

Tom: to talk about this person and to spend time with you and 

then it becomes so pleasurable. And that's a kind of Milner-esque gesture, that you have a choice. You can choose to make what she calls an [01:01:00] inner gesture 

towards that thing, 

and you can do it consciously.

You can go, " This is happening right now, and I can just gently move my attention to this other place." And sometimes we can't, and we're overwhelmed, and it's too much. But for her this inner voice that says, "No, you can choose to go away from this one thing and lean into your..." Yeah.

Is it the right hemisphere or the left 

Alex: hemisphere? I 

always- It'll be the 

Tom: the right.

Yeah. You... And lean into the 

Alex: right

hemisphere. You can cultivate 

Tom: it.

You can cultivate it.

Uh- it gets 

stronger with 

time. Exactly,

And it gets stronger with time if you keep practicing it, and there's so much pleasure

there.

Yeah.

And I think that's a great 

gift that, 

you know, Miguel, Crystal all these people who are asking us these questions about is the way we're living and the way we're told to live, is it really the only way to live? And does it need to be this 

like-- 

Do you need to pay a lot of money to go on holiday in order to [01:02:00] experience these things?

Or can you take a holiday in your own body 

in your day-to-day? 

Yeah. 

And again, it's h- it's super hard. I'm 

Alex: not like-

And again, the hardest part is to try and reconcile them, which in my view is possible but very difficult, which is you know, if you're an ambitious-- Like an ambitious person might be listening to this, and they might be thinking, "I don't wanna hear 

about this.

I 

wanna hear about

how I can increase my income." And sometimes we talk about very practical things on this podcast. I made a podcast on how to lose weight. We'll talk about-- I'd like to talk more about 

Tom: finances.

I wanna listen to

that.

one. Yeah. 'Cause I think- 

Alex: think- it's like- I need that one.

'Cause the, 'cause I think these things matter. And so for me the, m- the needle in the haystack I'm trying to move to is how do you live a life that is practical, and if you have ambitions, trying to cultivate those ambitions as well, but also keeping in mind you can do that in a way that's more present, that's less cravenly chasing results at each point.

Tom: I [01:03:00] think for me, one of the things that I'm really preoccupied with through Marion and other forms of my life, I think I oscillate between the two extremes. I either... which is very similar to her in some ways. I either go into this like hyper-driven gurning. I always feel like I'm gnashing my teeth.

It's "Ah," like I need. And it's kind of full of rage, and it's a bit, like you say, kind of joyless. Or I have this like oceanic, " I'm just drifting in my thoughts, man. It's all great." And I'm just like super... But I'm kind of like an amoeba. I'm just braw, through life. And I think I'm trying to find a way of moving that's active but gentle.

Right. Where I do what needs to be done, because I want things done. But I- if I find myself gurning, I go-

Alex: You need to put the 

Tom: brakes 

on a

bit. You need to slow down. 

You need to slow... And if I find myself being passive I try and go, "Wait, Tom, what's [01:04:00] going on?" Like why is there no movement to this?

And so-- 

And I think I'm in constant dialogue with her as... about that, and with, you know, therapists and- Yeah. You know, it's an 

ongoing thing. 

Alex: I'm 

m-making a film. I've been learning more-- I don't know. You know, I never studied cinema or film. I'm just a casual fan. been making this Thinking Film series for a few months, and one of the joys of making it for me is I just get to learn more about how films are made.

And it strikes me how hard it is, how difficult the career of a director is, how many ups and downs. How did 

Tom: you... 

Alex: So this book, "A Life of One's Own," how did you try and capture that on 

Tom: film?

Oh, blimey. We're actually gonna talk about the 

film.

 mean, I think the w- I, I-- In general, I think I'm in a point it's for a long... 

Alex: I 

Tom: made 

Alex: m-my 

Tom: films have always had a slight kind of strange... I always approach them in a slightly unusual way, which is I've made all of my films without a script.

So my films have [01:05:00] always been born of different starting points that eventually became a story and characters and events. And my early films were very like, character-driven but eventually the outcome, even if it was unusual in its conception, the outcome was pretty normal films. I thought that they were pretty nice, normal films.

And then after my first feature film came out, I remember, this is a long time ago now, I remember sitting in the cinema when we finished it, and I just thought, "I don't wanna make this film anymore." I don't want to make another character-driven drama. 

Alex: And 

Tom: this is a very long-winded answer 

Alex: to 

your question.

No, no, we're on a 

podcast. It's 

Tom: Okay. Okay. I don't know how long we should 

be. 

But anyway, 

Alex: and 

I 

Tom: started kind of drifting, and I started not knowing what to do next. 

And 

I read 

this 

book 

Alex: called 

Tom: The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, the th-theol-theologian who was a Protestant and fled the Nazis to Princeton and became the head of,

Alex: the head of

Tom: pastor or [01:06:00] something.

Anyway, and he wrote this book, The Courage to Be, which was his response to the existentialist. He was very close friends of Rollo May and he found that there was this kind of really interesting dialogue of what's the theological response to existentialism- Mm. -post-World War II. We've moved between the wars now.

And his response was that when God dies, 

God appears. Like, when you really allow God to die, when you 

allow 

your faith 

to 

die, 

you will find true faith. 

And 

this really affected me quite deeply 'cause of things to do with my family and stuff, and I just became really fascinated with this question of faith and this question of a different type of filmmaking.

It's kind of convoluted my answer, but I became really interested in a different type of filmmaking, which 

was 

much more 

about 

sensations 

Alex: and 

Tom: Elusive 

thoughts and elusive feelings, and I started experimenting with trying to make different s- and through that I also got to Milner, and she became another [01:07:00] guide on that.

But I had b- I had whatever recognition I'd had was for making like hyper-naturalistic character-driven films, and suddenly I was coming up with these very elusive abstract stories or things and the people who fund films 

just 

b-b-b-b-basically thought I'd lost my mind. I mean, I-- was, it was really they were like, "What are you doing?

You-- it's an act of complete self-destruction to build a body of work in one direction and then suddenly go, 'And now I'm gonna go a hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction.'" But it was like a call from within. I just needed to do it, and I didn't question it at the time. I question it 

Alex: now.

But at 

Tom: time, I was like, "No, this is where I need to go," and I started going down this route, 

and 

I started... And that's when I started studying dance more, and I started reading 

a 

lot of theology, a lot of mysticism, a lot of deep psychology, sort of going deeper into [01:08:00] psychoanalysis, into... Again, when you make films, often the talk about dialogues psy-- the dialogue about character psychology is so flat.

You know, oh, the character wants this, and therefore they do that. And the more you go into these things, you realize that 

w-we sometimes think we want something, but in fact we want the complete opposite. So how-- I, I was really interested in moving deeper and deeper into these kind of elusive parts of characters and finding a language for it in film, and Marion was a part of that.

Alex: And 

Tom: so 

I just started thinking how to make 

it into 

a film, 

and I couldn't find 

a way, 

and so I had to conjure up new ways of making films to do 

it. 

And 

Alex: I 

Tom: read, 

I think maybe I mentioned to you before, I read Joyce McDougall Theatres of the Mind, and that had a big impact on me because McDougall, in that 

book, 

talks 

about the multiplicity of self, and she uses this really striking image of a stage where our inner world is like a [01:09:00] stage where we have multiple selves, often oppositional voices.

And the interaction of these opponit-oppositional voices is the play of us, is the drama of us. And I started thinking of the film as a film that takes place inside this arena where there are multiple Milners and, in a sense, we are inside her experience. And 

once that 

image 

appeared, 

something started to click, and I started to feel like I'd found a language that might allow me to not break the f-the what I loved about the book 

into something 

that felt, you know, narrativey, overly narrativey.

It felt like it would give me space to to have this kind of fascinating self-reflection as an embodied experience. And have p-pieces of narrative, but then also have moments that are just about experience. [01:10:00] And then I started running from that place. And on a practical level, of course, no one wanted to fund this film, 

Alex: and 

so eventually 

Tom: this group, you know, a group of really amazing artists, friends of mine agreed to, to give me some money each, and it was just about enough 

to shoot 

the film.

And everyone who made the film agreed to work for a fraction of their fee. And the thing that really 

clinched it 

was 

M-M-Marian loved dancing. She was a big dance-dancing fan. She just loved going out dancing. And so I had this idea from a certain point on to to place the film inside a dance hall, like a 1920s dance hall, where the whole film takes place inside this thing.

And I started looking at dance halls, and I couldn't find anything that really worked. But dance halls made me think of Pina Bausch, you know, the world of Pina Bausch, which is the famous choreographer, and this kind of world of sort of smoky cafes and bars and kind of European atmosphere. and then suddenly [01:11:00] I remembered that Pina Bausch created her pieces inside this old cinema in Wuppertal.

She took over this 1940s cinema and kind of emptied it. And so it's a very famous space in dance history. And I thought, actually, oh, maybe that's interesting, 

like 

a cinema 

that this thing is happening inside a cinema, like a cinema of the mind.

Alex: mind." Uh,

Tom: But I didn't think Pina Bausch would let me, you know, the company, I didn't think they would let me do it.

So I, we started looking for replacements, and we found somewhere beautiful in Berlin that was sort of similar, but it was ex-ex-unbelievably expensive. We would never have been able to afford it. So I came to some... A friend of mine who I know was a big fan of my last film, who I sort of knew was connected to Pina Bausch if I'm honest.

But I didn't, you know, I just sort of put it to him. And I said, "Oh, you know, I wanna make the film, and I wanna make it like this," and, And we found this cinema, but it's super expensive. And he looked at the pictures and he said, "But this is just like the Lichtburg in Wuppertal." And I said, "I know.

That's the inspiration." He said 

why 

don't 

you just do 

it there?" And I [01:12:00] went you know," "maybe, 

Alex: maybe, you know, you could 

Tom: introduce me to them." And so luckily he introduced me to them, and they really liked it. And I th- I'm pretty sure we're the first non-company people who've been given permission to create- Wow

inside this space. And so once that was in place, it was like, 

Alex: we've gotta 

Tom: make this film. Yeah. Yeah. And so we just went for it, and we shot it last 

Alex: summer.

Wonderful. So the film's shot. Now it's being 

Tom: edited.

Yeah. 

I'm editing 

it now.

Alex: How can people support this process? I think there's like a crowdfunding campaign that's being started.

Tom: Yeah. So we're starting-- I don't know when this podcast will go out but we're starting a crowdfunding in March because again, this... it's all been made with private donations from people who like it and what I'm doing. And so we need to raise a bunch more money to do the post-production, and it's it's a really special little film.

And so yeah, we-we've got this crowdfunding campaign, and I'm really hopeful that people who are interested [01:13:00] in Milner or in psychoanalysis or in the working of the mind will be kinda curious to support a piece about that really, about everything. Everything that we've just talked about is the material that the movie is made of.

It's not even just what it's about. It's literally the material that it's made of, and so.

Alex: Absolutely. I'll put a link for that in the description, so if anyone's interested, they can offer their support.

I'm really-- I really want to read all of Milner's books now, 

Tom: you- thank you 

so much.

you mu- I mean, that's a big part of why I'm making this picture. Yeah. I just want people to talk about her- Yeah ... and be engaged with her 'cause she's one of a kind.

Alex: Just 

before we wrap up I did want to ask you about where we're at in cinema 

now. 

W- 

do you think now is a g- is a good time 

Tom: f-for films 

Alex: and movies? I guess there's a lot to 

Tom: say 

about 

it, but it's 

rare 

that 

I 

get

to- Just before we wrap up. 

Alex: we- That's a 

whole other conversation ...Just

before 

Tom: we wrap up, let's, let's 

open 

this 

Alex: chasm. Where are we at in, in 2026 in the movie world, 

Tom: do 

you think?

 I don't know. I feel like movies 

Alex: are [01:14:00] now 

Tom: in a point of c-crisis in a way.

I think, 

you know... 

There was a documentary about Martin Scorsese on 

Apple recently. Oh, yeah. And there's this incredible shot of a cinema in New York on the day that "Taxi Driver" was released, and you see a queue around the block of people waiting to see this new film. And I think movies Were relevant in a way that they aren't today.

Alex: I I think 

Tom: people who make movies are kind of clawing to try and find ways of making them 

relevant 

for 

people. 

Alex: But if I'm 

Tom: honest, my... I us- I 

feel, 

this is my own pers- obviously it's my own point of view, but that they're kind of 

doing it 

through 

trying to regurgitate the past.

Alex: Yeah. The f- the franchises, the intellectual 

Tom: property.

The franchises, but also in kinda art house cinema there's a kind of, "Oh, it's like a film from the [01:15:00] '70s," 

or- Ah, okay ...it's like everything is made to remind you of something when films were exciting. And I think one of the things... For example, one of the reasons why I'm making films in the way that I'm making it now it's not just because I've been rejected from film funds.

Because, for example, with this film 

I didn't 

even 

try. 

Alex: It's 

Tom: because

Alex: a

Tom: part of me wonders if instead of fearing the growing irrelevance of cinema, we embrace it. And instead of saying, "Oh my God, how can we become relevant again?" We can say we're not relevant." Yeah. But maybe there's a freedom 

in 

Alex: being 

relevant.

Yeah.

If If you don't have to be relevant, you can just make whatever you want, and dare I say it, maybe we'll 

Tom: come 

up 

with 

something new.

That's the hope. And I think I'm really interested, it's again, Adam Phillips who we mentioned, who's been supporting this film, one of the things that he always says to me is a John Ashbery quote where he says, "You can't hope to talk to people.

All you can do is speak to yourself and [01:16:00] hope someone starts listening in." And I think this movie is my attempt to wonder what it might be like to make films that don't try and talk to anyone, but hope that someone starts listening in. And maybe if we do that, and if we can make movies 

that are cheap 

enough, 

maybe someone will start leaning in and going, "What's happening with movies?

That's really interesting." Instead of screaming and shouting and forcing people to pay attention. Yeah. 

Alex: Which is 

Tom: also fine. It's just 

doesn't seem 

to 

be 

my 

way.

Alex: Yeah. And I think I resonate with a lot of what you're saying. For 

Tom: me, 

Alex: I can see that films se- have a less broad cultural relevance than they have in 

Tom: the 

past 

Alex: in terms of, let's say, pushing the 

Tom: boundaries.

Alex: But I still very regularly see new films which really are relevant to me and I find 

are 

really 

significant. 

Tom: Like what? 

Alex: , I'm a huge fan of horror, and I think a lot of horror films miss the mark. But then there's those few ... Because horror, I think, is such a liberating 

Tom: genre- 

Alex: Totally ... 

there's so many possibilities in honror- 

[01:17:00] horror 

You 

get this, 

it's wonderful metaphor for the creative process itself, in that 

Tom: you 

get a lot 

of 

junk

Exactly. But I think there's something great about horror, which is also it's a genre without any prestige

Yeah. 

There's no pressure.

And so on the one hand, the rules of the genre are very clear. On the other hand, it's sort of considered as a sort of B, and I think it gives people freedom- Absolutely ...to do interesting things that don't happen in the prestige films

Alex: Absolutely. So two of my favorite films of the last few years are Weapons 

and The Substance.

Which I don't know if you've watched those.

Tom: I haven't, but it's only because I'm very squeamish

Alex: You

can't watch 

Tom: The 

Substance if 

you're 

squeamish.

No. Well, My friend Ben who shot my first film, he shot The Substance. So it's really... You know, I'm a bad friend for not watching it, 

but 

I 

just 

can't. 

Yeah. I can't do it. I can't. I know what happens. I've heard, and I ju- I can't. It's too much for me. It's literally the reason why I can't watch horror films because it's just, they just get into my, under my skin. It's 

Alex: much.

Yeah, and this one certainly 

Tom: does. 

Alex: [01:18:00] Thanks so much for coming on, Tom. I really enjoyed talking to you.

We're gonna have to ha- we're gonna have to have you back at some point in the future. Good luck with the rest of the editing of this film, and I look forward to 

Tom: watching 

it 

once 

it 

comes 

out.

Thank you, 

Alex: Thank you. Thank