The Loud Whisper Takeover
Featuring interviews with actors, stunts, dancers, filmmakers, action movie directors, athletes, Krav Maga teachers, acting coaches, and more.
Epic tales of changemakers, authentic personal stories, and top tips about the industry, the podcast is a treasure of knowledge helping storytellers of all kinds on their own journeys, and inspiring people to take action upon their own dreams.
Ever heard your inner voice getting louder and louder, urging you towards a new path? When our inner guidance starts to become so loud, we can no longer ignore it, and we MUST take action... This is often a time when life changes direction drastically. We are literally being called to take that leap of faith, make that phone call, write that script, make that film in other words, time to embrace our wildest dreams, shift gear, and grow exponentially.
Let's dive into the art of listening courageously to our inner compass. Because every one of us is destined to live a grand story and adventure while walking on planet Earth!
Headphones on, notebooks out, and buckle up!
Hosted by Cindy Claes.
The Loud Whisper Takeover
18: Can Film Help Us Heal?
Curious about how the medium of Film can heal trauma and foster growth? This week's episode features an enlightening conversation with Dr. Joshua Lee Cohen (USA), media psychologist and CEO of the Digital Storytelling Project.
Dr. Cohen researches how film and video-based therapy can assist individuals coping with PTSD, depression, and anxiety by engaging their senses, emotions, and imagination. We also discuss how film can drive societal change and create meaningful dialogues.
Contact Guest:
https://yourdigitalstorytellingproject.com
https://filmandvideobasedtherapy.com/
Upcoming book:
“Film/Video-Based Therapy and Trauma: Post Traumatic Growth”
Instagram:
@film_video_based_therapy
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Cindy Claes - Host
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Welcome to the Loud Whisper Takeover podcast. My name is Cindy Klaas. I'm an action actress, also making film. As a human being and as an artist, I've always valued personal growth. A lot of my artistic work is about transformation. Right now I'm working on a new script. I'm writing a new action movie. I don't know yet where it's going. I'm at the very start of it but the development of one of the characters is tied to the processing of trauma. Today I have a very special guest. He talks about a creative process, community building. He's based in LA, he's a media psychologist, an author of many books and he has a film and video editor's background. Please welcome, dr Joshua Lee Cohen. Hi, dr Cohen, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Thank you for inviting me today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited to talk to you today. So you are the CEO of your Digital Storytelling Project. You specialize in film, video-based therapy and trauma and how it relates to post-traumatic growth. Can you give us a little bit of an explanation of what you actually do and what your work consists of?
Speaker 2:Well, as a consultant, we're growing fishing grants with the government right now helping a company called LaughMD which shows comedy videos to patients in hospital settings, and so we're bouncing first some pretty important grants like the NIH or this one with the military, and there's a few others congressional, so we're trying to get funding for building the app, making it more focused on certain populations.
Speaker 2:We've used it for cancer, chronic pain and we're getting from child's dumb in those areas, so laughter is the best medicine, so we're using it as medicine. That's just one of my clients, but it gives you an idea of how, when I consult what we're going for getting funding through these avenues and it uses the research that I did from Routledge to help support that, and so that's how I use. Film and video therapy is we're going to the future and building different examples for people to use, and the book is really a collection of people all over the world, so I have people from Italy and Spain and some a lot from the U? S and the famous general patents grandson, who does these multi-day filmmaking workshops on an online basis across the country. They've done clinical trials on their method and making films actually reduces symptoms of post-traumatic stress for those suffering from service-related stress, from service-related stress.
Speaker 1:So when you're saying you're, for example, showing comedy videos within those sectors, are we talking about short films? Is it like? Are they informative sort of videos? Are they fiction? What sort of videos are we talking about?
Speaker 2:They're actually like Science, Zelda, Monty Python or there's funny cat videos stand-up, but we've gone through and vetted them to make sure that they're not inappropriate for hospital settings so that they might trigger them Still in an early stage. But there's a lot of other features and tweaks that make it specific to doctors as well, and right now we have. We've been on the front page of New York Medical on one of their websites. There's been research and anecdotal studies done also in the USC Norris Cancer Hospital. It was launched at Cedar Sinai when it was a television show and a few other places that have used it, including Norris Cancer Hospital for the iPads to be out and the USC's IGM Art Gallery at Keck School of Medicine.
Speaker 2:So it's a real interesting piece. When you see people laughing and you realize that this is actually helping them, it makes you laugh and then you go wait, I just laughed, did that help? And so it helps to lighten the mood, but it also physically has some health effects that are almost like medicine, and so it really helps in so many ways. And that's just from watching films. The cancer research that I did was or I didn't do it, it was one of my offers. It was also in New York and working with the transitioning age population. Now, cancer is pretty difficult to go through already, as a lot of people know, and so the psychological effects of it were a lot of depression, PTSD, anxiety, and so making narratives and making movies actually helped them to process it and internalize it, creating, in some cases, some of the studies that need to cope and mastery over their skills and reducing some of those symptoms of depression.
Speaker 1:It gives meaning.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine who is a film editor in the Directors Guild has also trained under Peter Levine's method, which is a method for trauma and it's about dealing with overwhelming experiences. He says that you can learn about sensation, affect, behavior, invention, meaning, the way that Peter Levine talks about with traumas. That's what makes a good film. He's saying that you want a film that is a lot of sensation and not just words and dialogue. Dialogue but like music and movement, and then the affect you want to feel something, and then there should be a behavior, some sort of action, and then an image of course, and then meaning and he calls that striking and people being calls that the side vamp, and paul likes to know it has to bam, try to remember.
Speaker 2:It's got a punch to it so that you, when you look at your films or you look at any of your work, you can say does it match, does it resonate with the side van? You know, does it give it? All those elements and meaning shouldn't really last in a film. It's really a medium that moves and gives sensations and you feel it in the body, not so much in your head, and that's where it also works for trauma and that's why it's a pretty good match with filmmaking because you know the military even there's a very similar ranking to how they set up a film hierarchy, and so the military found it very easy to go into these workshops because they knew exactly how to follow the place and who was in charge and how to follow that order Even if they were different ranks what they'd be doing in the film.
Speaker 2:So it allows people to collaborate gives them a sense of community in the project and there's a lot of things that it could be used for. That can be very healthy.
Speaker 1:And so, if we're talking about the person that is watching, right, the film and the positive effects that it has, are you saying that all the content that is being shown has a positive aspect it's comedy, that sort of things or would there also be films that might be very sad to watch? Does that also help to process some part of their emotional trauma, or not?
Speaker 2:Yes, we're not doing that with this one. But when it comes to Aristotle, if you go way back to the Greeks, he had the term catharsis, which meant literally purge or the vomit, and it also means to purify. So people would go and watch like a tragedy, like later with Shakespeare and it would cleanse and purify the emotions of the audience when you see a tragedy. So that's the purpose of probably why so many Hollywood films are getting the Academy Award, not when they show the altruistic happy ending but when they show the tragedy, because that really gets into the emotions of the audience and allows you to breathe or feel without having to have a loss.
Speaker 1:And it just it really.
Speaker 2:It's like. It's like having wasabi of the soul. It means happier system, and so I hope that people don't interpret this as only funny videos are going to be healing. The whole gamut is very healthy, and even the ability to make a film, especially, is to be very helpful, but not so much in a therapeutic way.
Speaker 1:I found it's more about some other things like empowering and connecting, collaborating and building community so, and before I ask questions, as a maker, I still want to talk about us watching movies. So obviously you work with patients that have certain illnesses, or maybe people in the military that are going through post-traumatic events, but even us being at home binging Netflix. Should we be mindful of what we watch and what we consume? Because obviously, for example, I love watching a good thriller or something with suspense. Would you say it is positive, it's positive in certain circumstances or not? Or what would be your take on this?
Speaker 2:Well, it depends, of course, on the person. There's a guy by the name of Gary Solomon who was a social worker and I flew him out for a conference when I was doing my undergrad work. That's where this whole interest started, and he showed films to his patients. So he would say you know, I think this kind of reminds me of this, and what's amazing about this it's so obvious when you hear it is that the suspension of disbelief is what pulls someone out of denial and that's the focus of his work.
Speaker 2:If you think about it, documentary is more about fact, but with fiction you get to the truth of real emotions. Not that you don't with documentary either, but film that goes into fiction has a value that you don't have to worry about the labels all matching up. You get creative world where the truth comes out of how you feel, where it's documentary does evoke emotion, but it's also more based on are we getting the facts right, hopefully, and getting a narrative based off of that, because you have a animals. So I think a lot of people dismiss fiction as being sort of like well, you know, I don't want to do a thriller. That's bad for you Sometimes going through a crisis and coming out of a case can be very cathartic, and you can feel that in a lot of, you know, horror films and comedies alike.
Speaker 2:It's just a matter of is that going to be right for you or is that going to be triggering to you? Or you might get through it, but do you really want to eat popcorn all the way through? Or are you going to watch Field of Dreams and only think this is Iowa and they have a lot of? They have a lot of corn in the seal.
Speaker 2:Maybe this is is it cute for me to get popcorn? No, it's been father-son relationships. But if they get popcorn out of it that's fine. But this ails. I just hope that if people use films for healing, that they talk about it somehow, not just watch it and have the catharsis. But the whole point of what both ways are about is to bring conscious things that were kind of laid dormant in our unconscious as troy or even young talked about. So bringing that to the forefront is important. To share that with someone later, which people do often. They go to the coffee afterwards and they go to dinner and they're like, oh my god, can you believe this? And that actually can be healing right there, because the connection you have with someone afterwards is where all the healing really takes place anyway, whereas art kind of opens up the door.
Speaker 1:And that leads me to my next question, my mentor that I love very dearly. He always told me, cindy, art asks really good questions. It doesn't per se give answers, but it asks good questions so that we can then create, eventually, you know, healthy spaces for debates and that is the purpose of art so that those debates and those conversations, conversations can happen. So can you talk a little bit more about what you said? You know, like the after film, the having a coffee, the talking about the sharing of what we just saw, like what does that generate in our hearts and souls?
Speaker 2:I love that question because you're basically asking, what does the soul want? And that's going to be different. The mention that I brought back to trauma is that when you're overwhelmed, sometimes you don't even know that you're overwhelmed over something, but you see a film or you see it happen to another character. I think his name was Neil Diamond, the famous science fiction writer, talked about how fiction can actually help develop the muscle for empathy, because empathy is not like I hear it misused all the time, where people say, oh, you need to show respect, or they say empathy, but they meant respect, meant respect.
Speaker 2:Empathy is like it's a muscle. You have to kind of develop it. As for open up the door for compassion and and be receptive, it's not really something you can actionably do. It's more of a passive thing, and so when I hear people or people see a film, it opens up that door to empathy, because then you're you're connecting to characters that aren't even real but you're feeling it like they are and you're able to find out things about yourself and your friends and your world around you that maybe you hadn't thought of before and you're going to want to share that with someone, because that helps build empathy in not just the characters, but people like that, yourself and the world around you.
Speaker 2:It the in some such a powerful medium, it's not just the actors of the world, just the cinematography, music, the movement, the blocking, the location. There's so many different people. Even the props person could put in something like, if you think of, think of Indiana Jones when he's getting that idol, that leads a mark on people for the rest of their lives and everyone remembers that. Everyone plays an hugely important part, like even the craft service people on set or the hideout scenes when you're doing posts. There's so many different elements.
Speaker 2:It's a huge city that basically comes in and makes Shonsa light, literally on the actors and it's such an amazing thing that, with all the miscommunication the world, that these projects can even come together and people can even finish things. That amazes me. Probably a lot of the people in that too, but it's uh, if you think about it, it's like one cohesive message when it's done, but there's like 15,000 people involved. Not even exaggerating. It's amazing what. What happens when that comes together. It happens all the time, Like it's nothing.
Speaker 1:It's so true. It is such a magical experience, like my first ever short film. It was a passion project. I didn't even know how to make a film and all of a sudden I attracted 26 people to make it, which was absolutely insane witness of how everybody just moved together as a one and as a team we were. We came together within a matter of days and then seeing the final product I just want to bounce back on something that you said that I thought was really powerful, which which is through film, we basically develop empathy, we create empathy and we often talk, I think, as as filmmakers, you know, we don't do it for the fame, but we are storytellers and stories kind of change hearts and can transform people or give hope.
Speaker 1:But what you're saying is not only that, we also contribute to the wider world because we help people develop and nurture their empathy. That is so incredibly powerful. So how would you say, how do you see the power of film even going beyond processing trauma, but actually even being able to contribute to a way better world in that case?
Speaker 2:I think a good explanation would be from a chair for a show of film where it is called Russia. I think they have so many different angles and stories contributing to this one event. I think a woman was raped and then someone comes in and explains it to the police what his story is and then they show the film again from another person's perspective and none of them line up, like they're all totally different epithets of the same event.
Speaker 2:And I think it was so common that people can have different stories on the same event that this became what you just called the Rashomon Sefton people, what you refer to it as we don't know what really happened and I think that kind of empathetic response of knowing that we don't always get the whole story and it may sound compelling, but if you hear and open up your heart and listen to what other things, other perspectives, other political views, just with respect, and listen and think there's a whole story behind that could be a whole movie, then you can live your life hopefully being the star of your own film. Then you can live your life hopefully being the star of your own film, hopefully go into an extra in their own movie. But it's easy as a metaphor. But to be able to listen that way and there's probably another whole film behind that that I'm just not getting, and that that leads us to being open and that kind of openness is what leads us to empathy.
Speaker 1:I want to ask you a silly question, if I may, because you talked about films that might trigger something in us. So, for example, there is one particular kind of film that makes me cry, like in a second, and that is when there is a couple that is madly in love and one or the other dies in the movie, and when that person died, it just I started crying like a fountain and I always thought why do I have this sort of reaction? Do I have like a past life where, you know, I lost the love of my life, or what is this? Because I cannot, like, I cannot connect it to anything that I've personally experienced. So what would you make of that?
Speaker 2:When you focus on something that's not real, or like when playing as a kid with a toy or a blanket or teddy bear, that's a transitional object Because you're putting characteristics to it that are part of you. And I lost a teddy bear when I was a little kid and it was like a horrible glitch defense. It's just an inanimate object. But when you carry an emotional charge that you project onto something which speaks about, like what is film, it's not even real, it's just solid frames that when you play it really fast it's literally projected. And that is a term they use. Because you're taking your imagination, your internal worlds and putting it all on the line and trusting that they're going to take you to a good place. If you think about, like anything that happens in a film, if that happened in real life you wouldn't be crying, you'd be fearful and scared and all these other things. But because you trust the filmmakers that most of the time they're going to resolve the issue, you can eat popcorn and enjoy it and pay money because this experience allows us to surrender into a pattern that is like reassuring that life has some sort of meaning to it in that brief two hours. So hopefully, like you know I I'll cry off of weird things Like I just saw the Steve Martin production entry the other day on Apple and I love the movie so much because here's a very funny comedian but also had some very poignant, like romantic roles throughout the years and I'd seen all this stuff growing up and it's just like to see an arc of a human being to be able to act so seriously and write very poignant novels and at the same time be hilarious. That really, I think, reaches people in in different ways, because you don't see a lot of actors at that range and he's like in the 70s now but it you know, seeing that kind of like whole breadth of a human being and being and showing the public like, hey, this is what happiness looks like. You have to go through some stuff and you have to be a little. You can study philosophy, but in logic, but you also have to get a little silly. You have to be able to connect to people and that's what his focus was.
Speaker 2:I guess in college he studied philosophy and wondered about the meaning of life, but then at the end of the day he said I'm just going to focus on my craft. But philosophy kind of told him how to break things apart, and comedy helped connect him and bring things together. And then his acting career brought him into a longing that kind of made it more about romance and searching and connecting in different ways, and that's his books and all these other things and his music. You know, people are so multifaceted that you know you can reach out in a romantic zone and maybe that is part of you that you know is still longing for something.
Speaker 2:And then it dies and you're like wait, that's not the way I wanted it to be, but it doesn't happen. That's the cool thing. It's like you get a relief. You don't have to actually grieve, hopefully, but that maybe there is something you know a loss there that needed to be completed, and in real life we don't always get to complete or see the ending of things, whereas we see a tragedy, but at least it's over and we can close that part off and retread its role. It would be nice if we had that in real life.
Speaker 2:We have commencement ceremony, we have little rituals, but it doesn't always happen. Some things are just left, like the sentence just not even finished, so hopefully it hopefully was a good cry is what I'm asking. Like the sentence was not even finished, so hopefully it was a good cry is what I'm asking, like hopefully it wasn't like oh my God, I hate this.
Speaker 1:Usually I have like really deep, profound cries. I'm like in full empathy with those characters. But yeah, I can really connect to what you're saying. Maybe there is the loss of something else that happened in life and that was just my way of processing it through another story. That was maybe not linked with what I saw, but there was the essence of that story that kind of triggered this emotion or helped me process a emotion. It feels good too.
Speaker 2:It feels powerful, it feels overwhelming, but when you're done you feel like a balloon that got deflated or something it's like how did this magic happen? Because it touches you in a way that I don't think any other art form can, because it includes all the other art forms. You've got music and you've got dance. I mean, it can be anything. And to answer your other question, I think it can address wars that have not been. You know, it does, you know, think of, like the John Wolf films. Or he answered questions about love and war at the same time.
Speaker 2:There's lots of examples of that, where they expand their scope to include political and sociological questions that may not even be answerable and sociological questions that may not even be answerable, and in some cases they just answer the question in comedy, like I've heard a different opinion on this, but like Bruce Almighty might actually include Morgan Freeman as God. Yeah, that's the character. So there's very little room for debate about what his existence and they can get in more questions about in that context. I'm not going to throw the ABS off the cliff yet, just to be able to say, hey, this allows a different kind of discussion to go out there and it's fun and it's the suspense of disbelief that allows people to enter new discussions and new worlds and feel things that maybe they wouldn't have felt before. New worlds and feel things that maybe they wouldn't have felt before.
Speaker 1:And you know, this conversation is also giving me a lot of confidence in what I'm doing now, because I'm writing a new script. But then there's this thing of, okay, I'm writing a script and I'm following whatever is coming up, and that's creativity. But then these questions start. Right, it's like, yeah, but what kind of audience is going to relate to that? What kind of? You know, like you already, I'm already further ahead in the process, whereas I should just trust that the script has an essence, with a character that has an essence, and whatever the character will feel, well, another person might get healing through it, even if it's not that particular story that played out in their lives.
Speaker 1:So you are also coaching and consulting for people that are involved in film and making film. So let's talk about pre-production first. So pre-production there would be the screenwriter and then the producer and like the director and casting and things like that. What kind of things would you give as advice or top tips or a special point of view that you have for everything in regards to pre-production and how we can implement what you're researching and what you're working on within that phase of filmmaking?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to plug a company that does location scouting and uses virtual reality for pre-digitalizations. That's the third floor and they're huge in what they do with everything from game of thrones, the avengers, all the huge effects films and what they've done is they they just do the pre-visualizations for using vr. I think vr can be very helpful in a lot of things. I didn't know that they also used it for location scouting so the location scout and pre-production wouldn't have to fly out there. They could first see if I'm in v and move around and get the shots lined up and go. That's where we need to go and they did that a lot.
Speaker 2:So virtual reality is being used more and more in Unreal Engine, even to give the directors a real sense of power and form before they can start. And the other thing that I love, that kind of merges pre-production and post altogether. Now is Unreal Engine also coming from virtual reality and start. And the other thing that I love, that kind of merges pre-production and post all together now is Unreal Engine also coming from virtual reality. Dr Skip Rizzo did the foreword to my last book and he's at the Institute of Creative Technology at the University of Southern California and they combine people that are academics at Hollywood, people and all kinds of creative and technical people and act to write new technologies for medicine.
Speaker 2:And they've done that with the army as well. And so what I love about what they're doing with the unreal engine is it takes all those elements together and actors are mostly reacting to things. So if you're going to put a dinosaur from like jurassic park, from the f4, like robin williams as I joke you know joe angie in those interviews where he's like you can't see the rhino, how do you get around? And so what I love about the unreal and virtual film set is now they can see it and and then then that also helps the people in doing pre-production for cinematography, because now they're getting reflective light instead of a green spill and a lot of real sunsets that you can shoot for hours at a time now or literally move mountains. It helps both pre, during and post all together and just brings it back to story mode pre, during and post all together and just raise it back to story mode. So, and I'm hoping that that will come through in film and video therapy so that patients can use that as well and they actually have like a $20,000 version people can use and even one on the iPhone. I found this company that said we'll allow you to put unreal like right into your eyes on and shoot it so you can have like a set behind you and then move. The eyes on the set, moves along with it, even on such a low budget. So that's opening up doors for what I'm trying to do, so that a doctor or a psychologist can use it and make movies with their patients and what's the material?
Speaker 2:Just like I think it was Gabriel Byrne in the HBO special in treatment, they just showed them doing a session and that was a whole hour of an HBO show and they did a whole series on that where people just without cutting away or showing flashbacks, they just showed really a well-done drama of what goes on in the therapy room, because it's a story. Ultimately, people are coming in. You know where they came from, they share something very intimate and then you have to listen and open up your heart to them and try to not coach them, because you can't tell them what to do. You have to be able to ask them questions that will hopefully lead down to themselves and let them do the work. It's really hard to deal and the guy that plays you know therapists in that. Um, the tv show it's called in treatment again, just so people look it up. It's just an amazing depiction of what a therapist goes through and what the patient goes through and how that dynamic is very dramatic.
Speaker 2:I don't even think they put music, it's just a session and there's so much going on there and when people find themselves or they find these triggers, it's really easy to identify them. Really, it's really easy to identify with them. So storytelling is essentially just being able to get lose your suspense, create the suspense of disbelief and just enter that world. And that's why I see the parallel of therapy. It's just know that each person is in their movie and even try to use the techniques of film. If we could use the techniques of seeing it as not the production end, but more as the, the writers end, or even the film viewers, I need to say look, this content that we're watching or that we're creating in our lives could be like a film and know when you're in the second act of the film. You know that when you're watching it.
Speaker 2:But it's hard in real life to go. I'm going through all this right now, probably because it's going to get resolved later if I address it, and that could be very comforting because after a while life does tend to have like a, an art to it and it's watching films teaches us how to act and how to be and also how to enjoy, how to celebrate, how, when that lull comes out. You know, not every part of the film is full of conflict. Sometimes we're celebrating party anger.
Speaker 1:There's so much to life that that pattern mimics and that is very important to therapy so you talked a lot about sort sort of film that can be made between patient and, or about patient about therapist or between therapist and patient. Do you have another example of a production that has been maybe implementing some of what you're talking about within their team and within their creative process, but where the end result was a wider audience and where there were still a possibility or open doors for healing, even though they might not have been the military or patients, but where as creators, as filmmakers, we as a team can really take something from this to say, oh, my film is more than just this story. Do you have another specific example that you could give?
Speaker 2:The book that I did just recently. It's film and video and trauma. There's a film in there called the director and the drama therapist that worked on it. The director called the film Ganny Girls. It went to a lot of festivals. It was seen by a wider audience but it addressed some of the issues at the time of Skid Row in Los Angeles and so she brought in a drama therapist to work with them and talk to them.
Speaker 1:Just for the audiences that don't know Los Angeles. So Skid Row is an area in Los Angeles where there is a huge amount of homelessness and also a big community of drug addicts that are living in the streets, right.
Speaker 2:Thank you for filling in. Unfortunately, that's the way it is and it's hit almost a crisis point where our mayor, karen Bass, has declared that as her first priority and because our governor also had a large priority in focusing on that. Even before COVID they had a lecture like a press conference at a board of care home. So it's become really almost a hopeless situation, but they're focusing on a lot of resources board of care homes, affordable housing and just trying to make it more accessible.
Speaker 2:My goal, I think, with putting up that particular chapter in this to bring awareness to it, so people people could read the book and I have a website that I'm going to plug that later is so people can see clips of the film, they can see the work that people do with clients and they can have an idea of what we do, because there's people been doing this since the 40s. I just trademarked it and called it film and video therapy, so that it continues to have a license attached to it and it starts to build a brand that protects the professionalism of both communities of filmmakers and therapists, so that therapists don't start thinking they're filmmakers and filmmakers don't start thinking they're therapists. But ultimately I've seen where it's headed and I hope it does is that peer support specialist is a new bill that was passed into law and so people started taking those courses, which they're not that much, and sometimes you can get scholarships through, like NAMI. I think filmmakers could actually take that and learn how to support each other officially and build off a medical health back. That would be really helpful in the community, because not everyone could be everything to everyone, but that might be as a way of doing healing zones on a massive level, and there's a lot of communities that can do that. I just see that it's a real potential. Uh, boom and benefit for hollywood, because there's actually so much suffering.
Speaker 2:Artists and people try and struggle for money and that could be one way of really reaching out and cleaning the past, getting paid for it and supporting each other in the process, which would make a better film too.
Speaker 2:So the funding would come out of the film as a better reach to the audience, because then there's a more tender moment or more ability to reach those. Especially if you're an indie filmmaker, there's a lot of struggle there to do this on every level. That might be a one way of doing it and that's something I'm going to try to focus on the next book. But I think getting it out there in a podcast it's like, hey, it's open to anyone to do that, you just have to take the training course and pass it fast and then you just basically well, I'll figure out a protocol for it later, but I think people can figure it out. There's enough problems in the world that if that solved all of them and I put myself out of business, that's awesome, because I don't think we're going to get to the root of all trauma. I think it seems, unfortunately, it's going to be around forever, because that's just a part of life.
Speaker 2:But if that right there can help make filmmakers' lives easier to connect and give them more tools to connect from mental health so that they make better films but also, more importantly, they have more fulfilling lives. That would be the goal of what I'm trying to do. I'm more focused on the filmmaker than the end product, whereas I think traditional films are more about let's do whatever it takes, let's get a good you know, check the gate, clean it and then go on and we'll forget the person that's screaming and crying on the ground and just tell them to get up and hurry up and wait. It's not always like that. If the priority is on the filmmaker, just like in any business, I think you're always going to win, and that takes a little different skill set, but they have trainings for that now, so you wouldn't have to go like to be a psychologist. You just have to have a lived experience.
Speaker 1:And then that lived experience is something that you relate to others with and that they're saying it's what helps heal you also told me that one of your big, biggest successes is actually healthy relationships that you've lost and rebuilt through your work. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Speaker 2:yeah, I'll self-disclose a little bit, because I do have a PhD. I'm quite a bit trained, but I'm also I've lived experience with bipolar disorder, which is wrecks, havoc throughout one's life. There's never like an end to it, and when I got divorced, my little you know boss a lot of connections in my family. I burned like almost every bridge you could imagine in my life, from banks to schools. It felt like I was just a rag. So when you have healthy relationships in your life, you get your family back, you get your friends, even my ex-wife and I I send her jokes a lot. We keep a healthy boundary, though, and so if you have three things I think are really important, that I learned about reconnecting is have love, the appropriate calories and the occasional cheeseburger.
Speaker 2:I just joined the third one, but I don't know why but those things can really strengthen any relationship is when you have those boundaries and people feel that sense of power back and their sense of respect, and then it allows them to play and enjoy all those elements. And that's just true for everyone. And it really helped me to get back connected to my family and a lot of my friends and even honestly, when you have respect, even your enemies will look at you differently. Those still may not like you, but if they have respect for you, get that boundary back and that's a good way to be in the world. When you literally respect everyone, you see even people you don't like, whether it was opinions you just want to change because they're just wrong but you respect them anyway because they're a human being and they have a right to see things from their lens. I don't know their Rashomon effect, I don't know their story and I'll never know their story, so I can't really judge them the way I want to. I have to take that in.
Speaker 2:There's more to it and I think films can teach us that there's no other medium quite like it in the history of mankind to have that many art forms. And then editing Editing's like a new thing. You know we don't. You have dramas on stage but, like Carl Jung said, like you, he's never seen something like a movie, because you can see the entire arc of the character, from beginning to end, in a way that like theater just doesn't do. So. It's a real, it's an amazing thing we've had for 100 years and it's just getting better and more accessible for people to communicate. What, um, what's his name? Igmar bergman said it's a soul to soul communication, and that's really the heart of what I'm trying to do. It's not medicine in the sense that you're taking a pill, but you're getting into the soul of something, a deepening of experience that you just can't get with words.
Speaker 1:These personal stories. Have you actually translated them in film as a method of healing, or can you recognize things in your scripts, or is it just? No, that was maybe the start of the journey that was to come, that you're in the path that you're walking now well, it's more like a journal.
Speaker 2:Maybe someday I'll have the money to show it publicly, but I would get dinged by the studios if I did rightly so, because it's there. A lot of it is their work and I've done this before. Where before? Where we approach them for the book, they'll let you show clips in certain ways for educational. But if you combine things, they don't like that because it messes with the intended copyright of the artist, and I agree with that. So what I've been doing is more of a personal soul collage, to try to pour a vision board, to try to visualize my life's worth.
Speaker 2:Anything and everything, like you said, doesn't have a broader impact. You can affect politics, you can address deeply held beliefs and say I would like to see it that way. It's like in this movie when it turns out that way, you can imagine stuff that is impossible and may always be impossible. But by starting from the point of I would like to make the world a better place, why not visualize it? Because you can't really build a building until you do the architecture like a building architect and build a better world. So to make the world better, you do have to start with yourself, but why not While you you're there, imagine everything better and just take it in that way. It may not happen, but there's no harm in doing a film without it, or whether it's actually there would be if it doesn't sell, but if you're doing it for like yourself, and you're writing and you're imagining things.
Speaker 2:Yes, we still need tragedy found, because that also brings us back to reality, but all those genres will come into play. We can't get away from trauma in the world. That's just part of human nature. But we can change the narrative and how we own up to things, and as a society we're starting to do that a lot more. There's so much change really. I mean, how do we keep up with it?
Speaker 2:And I think art has a huge influence on how we deal with stuff like ai. That's been there since isaac asimov did his work with ai, or even arthur c clark back in the 60s. They've been warning us, they've been telling us, they've been showing us how to deal with it and now that it's here, um, we should dust off those old books and movies and say how did they deal with it before it became an actual issue? Because there's some beauty to it, there's some danger to it, so we have to look at it from see what we've already done in art and how to handle it, because it's not going away. Um, even if we'd like to think stuff like that you know, we.
Speaker 2:We can challenge these things about through the art, and it's happening, and people are asking questions. We're going to coffee and they're, and they're talking it out. I think that's healthy, and if it weren't for art or music, we wouldn't have the option of like really bringing out the best of us, the best that's in us, to the other. And that's a quote from a professor in college, but I agree with that. He used to work at Roger Corman's studios too. He runs Ralph and Hitchcock, so he was the funniest little professor. But like his whole thing is character.
Speaker 2:I don't think films are only about character. I think they are, but there's so much more of a one on there. One so. But that sentiment that we can be our best selves, it is something I think is not unique to film, but it brings out a heck of a lot more than any of the other art forms individually. A really positive thing. Even the tragedy can all better us. But it brings out a heck of a lot more than any of the other art forms individually. A really positive thing. Even the tragedy can all better us. It can make us stronger. It can make us weak in the areas we didn't know. It takes us to places about humanity that are awful and awesome.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you were talking about AI, because obviously there is hope associated to AI, there is fear associated to AI. We talked about processing trauma through the process of filmmaking, but obviously we see very often we see trauma as something that's in the past and it kind of stays with us. When we talk about AI, it's more of a future projecting, future projected sort of fear. Do you think we can also process these fears of the future, the traumas of the future that haven't yet happened in our body, through this? You know this mixing of psychology and trauma processing, but going forwards rather than going into the past. For example, the Black Mirror on Netflix. It creates a lot of anxiety rather than there is no much sense of peace when people watch these episodes. So in that sense, I'm asking can we actually process the trauma of the future or do we actually just generate more anxiety with it? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think that if we addressed it and stay in the present, that means physically watching how we react and then, after we're triggered by something, don't hold it in, go to a friend, go to the coffee, someplace where you could walk outside and just talk and move and that's important to move the exercise and when this is happening, or just be like if you're introverted, listen to music or read a book and just passively take in what triggers you, because it's good to get a little trigger, because that means there's something affecting you and you need to process it your own way. But that also leads to a lot of creativity on your part, because now you have something to say, now you have an opinion that has triggered you, that you need to express and that can be really inspiring it, because that's what's so cool at our visit. Like you said, it doesn't have to answer all the questions, but it does ask the good ones, and Black Bear is a really good example of technology and futuristic stuff that brings up future anxiety and we can make it a better future. I don't know if you remember the film Argo, so that was the Ben Affleck film about using films to help people get the hostages out of that region. So I think what I'm saying is that filmmaking can also help us project into the future, for the next generation, not just for us.
Speaker 2:So sometimes we get deceit or angst. It never happens but for the present that's the most important thing being able to focus on what's present in our body, what the anxiety is, and not going so far over thresholds that we just zone out. That's not okay. We need to be present and have a little bit of anxiety, but not too much. So that's what Peter Levine calls our nervous system giving back online.
Speaker 2:If we allow it to regulate and do its thing, like a long breathing, then we'll have healthy emotions, a healthy amount of anxiety. We'll be talking with our friends. If you're extroverted and listening to music or reading quiet books, and that's how you process things as an introvert, there's all kinds of in vitro, but my point about creativity is we need all that to create new stuff, and I think what's happening, from what I understand in the film industry, is they're being pushed too quickly to produce stuff without that reverie or reflection, which is where the creativity really happens, and so that's a fault of the way the system is set up right now, and I know they've had problems writer strikes and acting strikes and all kinds of stuff systemically.
Speaker 2:It would help us producers really understood that about their creatives so that they could allow them to have some space to really have reverie and do the kind of work that ends blockbuster shows, which is when they're quiet, and allowing that empathy and that space to come in it would really help and they wouldn't have to have all those strikes, because they can make so much money off of real creativity not pushing them, and then they wouldn't need AI to come in.
Speaker 2:They could have real people doing stuff which is you can't have a healing film with a robot and as much as it might even be a good show, it's not going to happen because it's not going to heal ever. Healing comes out of real people because robots don't heal.
Speaker 1:So, writing for sci-fi, action, thrillers and suspense, I feel really inspired and I also have a boost for my creativity and trust. Also what is coming out of me, because contributing to the wider world has always been a part of my purpose as an artist and this conversation was very, very enriching and just gave me a lot of yeah, let's go for it. It so. I hope that creatives that are listening to this episode will definitely feel the same. Dr cohen, where can people find your work or, if they want to work with you, read your books? Can you please give us the titles, the websites, your social media handles and everything else?
Speaker 2:awesome. Thank you, and and it has been a pleasure to be here I just want knowing that you got inspired and and feeling of relief and going back to doing your craft is exactly what the purpose of. What I'm trying to do is not to criticize hollywood, but to say you're doing such good work. It's so much more important than just entertainment. This is really affecting people's culture and we need need this. It's not a want, it's we need this.
Speaker 2:You try to take away someone's film that they watched when they were a kid and they will go nuts. They need it like they own it almost, and so it's really important to have Andy Jones and all the different gamut because they speak this, all of everything out there. So to find out what I do with therapy, go to film and video based. Therapycom is the one in the book. It'll connect you. If you want to find me, there's a link to your digital storytelling project on that website and that's where I do all the work with grant writing and I don't write that. I just assemble teams and there's a professional team that does the writing, but I'm more like a consulting and I help find things and make them work, regardless of what technique or skill we use.
Speaker 2:But I'm not standoffish. I don't even get paid until they get paid. I get paid out of the grant or whatever comes through. That way, people know that I'm working with them and doing everything I can because I'm motivated by that result. But hey, I'm just going to tell you some advice and walk away.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Dr Cohen, to be a light in this world and to encourage everybody to make this world a better world. I will make sure that I will put all the details of your books and your website in the show notes and I can't wait to just continue following your work. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's a pleasure to be.
